Concept of Ecosystem Carrying Capacity for Marine Ecosystem Management

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Concept of Ecosystem Carrying Capacity for
Marine Ecosystem Management

• Sinjae Yoo
• KORDI
• Ansan, South Korea

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Outline

• Why a new concept?
• Ecosystem services
• Interactions, linkages, and tradeoffs
• Ecosystem Carrying Capacity
• Definition
• Properties
• Future directions

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YSLME Project

• Project Title Reducing Environment Stress in
  the Yellow Sea Large Marine Ecosystem.
• Project Objective Ecosystem-based
  Environmentally-Sustainable management and Use of
  the YSLME and its Watershed Reducing Development
  Stress and Promoting sustainable Development of
  the Ecosystem from a Densely Populated, Heavily
  Urbanised, Industrialised Semi-Enclosed Shelf Sea

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Five major environmental problemsin the Yellow
Sea ecosystem (from TDA report)

• Marine environmental pollution
• Marine and coastal habitat modification
• Change in ecosystem structures and functions
• Unsustainable fisheries
• Unsustainable mariculture practices

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• Since we identified the major problems, all we
  have to do is to solve each problem?

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Interactions between ecosystems and human
societies
Climate systems
Human societies
Indirect drivers
Provisioning
Supporting
Regulating
Ecosystem
Direct drivers
Cultural
Services Benefits people get from
ecosystems Drivers Factors that change ecosystem
structures, rates, and processes
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Provisioning services of YSE

• Foods
• wild fish, shellfish, algae, etc
• Aquaculture
• Genetic resources
• New materials
• Biofuels

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Regulation services of YSE

• Sewage treatment (water quality regulation)
• Disease control
• Climate regulation

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Supporting services of YSE

• Nutrient cycling
• Primary and secondary production, and their
  transfer
• Maintenance of biodiversity

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Cultural services of YSE

• Spiritual/religious values
• Aesthetic values
• Recreation and ecotourism
• Cultural diversity

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Multiple drivers
Fishing
Fisheries Resources
Aqua-culture
pollution
Climate change
Habitat degradation
Ecosystem changes
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HUMAN ACTIVITIES Land use (agriculture, sewage)
Fisheries
Jellyfish
Construction/ Water use
Aquaculture
Climate change
Precipitation
Hypoxia
Freshwater input
Nutrients NPSi
Food web/ Productivity
Temp.
Stratification
Eutrophication
HAB
Sea level rise.
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Fish catch
aquaculture
Overfishing
Provisioning services
biofuels
Genetic resources
pollution
Primary and secondary production
Maintenance of biodiversity
Supporting services
Habitat modification
Nutrient cycling
Water Quality regulation
Unhealthy Aquaculture
Climate control
Regulating services
Disease control
Climate change
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Necessity of a unified concept

• Ecosystems provide many services.
• We cannot manage each service separately.
• There are linkages and tradeoffs among services.
• Not all the drivers are controllable (e.g.,
  climate change).
• There is a limit in ecosystem services and the
  services are inter-dependent.

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• The limit of services will be determined by
  various ecological processes, which in turn are
  determined by ecosystem configuration and state.
• There is a need for a comprehensive and holistic
  quantity that describe this capacity of ecosystem
  to provide its services.
• Such capacity will change under different
  environmental conditions.

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Logistic modelVerhulst (1838, 1845)
KCarrying Capacity
Logistic growth
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Carrying Capacity in trout aquaculture (Le Cren,
1973)
Harvest stock (ind. m-2)
Numbers are in logarithm
Initial stock (ind. m-2)
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Previous usage of the term Carrying Capacity

• Human population dynamics (Verhulst, 1838 1845)
• One of the basic concepts in ecology r-K
  selection,
• PICES Science Program (1996-2006) Climate
  Change and Carrying Capacity
• Ability of ecosystems to sustain fishery and
  other living resources, (Olsen, et al., 2006).

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Ecosystem Carrying Capacity

• Capacity of an ecosystem to provide various
  services
• The capacity is determined by ecosystem
  structure, productivity and habitat integrity.
• This capacity will change as societal
  requirements increase and climate change
  accelerates.

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ECC through time
Time
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Determinants of ECC and drivers

• Ecosystem structure
• Trophic structure (e.g., fishing, climate change,
  nutrient budgets)
• Biological Productivity
• Nutrient budget, climate change (stratification,
  alteration of freshwater cycle, solar radiation,
  etc)
• Habitats integrity
• Water quality (eutrophication, aquaculture)
• Habitat destruction and modification
• hypoxia

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Further questions

• How to quantify ECC?
• Different approaches for services?
• Provisioning services
• Regulating
• Supporting
• Cultural
• Or unified valuation?

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Properties of ECC

• How long does an ecosystem can provide its
  services at certain level? (sustainability)
• How much an ecosystem provide that service?
  (maximum Capacity)
• How stable are the services? (resilience)

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Future directions for YSLME

• Theoretical formulation
• Quantification of ECC
• Properties of ECC and their behavior
• Assessment of ECC of YSLME
• Multi-scale approaches are desirable
• Modeling of ECC of YSLME based on scenarios
• How will it change given the changes in the
  ecosystem by climate changes
• Regional scenarios

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Summary

• For a unified concept of ecosystem management,
  ECC is proposed.
• ECC can conveys in the time of rapidly changing
  world.
• Further formulation is needed to use the new
  concept.
• Scenarios-modeling in regional scale will be
  useful for future management.

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Thank you!