A food-web assessment model for marine mammals, fish, and fisheries in the Norwegian and Barents Seas

The Norwegian and Barents Seas host large commercial fish populations that interact with each other, as well as marine mammal populations that feed on plankton and fish. Quantifying the past dynamics of these interacting species, and of the associated fisheries in the Norwegian and Barents Sea is of high relevance to support ecosystem-based management. The purpose of this work is to develop a food-web model of intermediate complexity and perform a quantitative assessment of the Norwegian and Barents Sea ecosystems in the period 1988–2021 in a manner that is consistent with existing data and expert knowledge, and that is internally coherent. For this purpose, we use the modelling framework of chance and necessity (CaN). The model construction follows an iterative process that allows to confront, discuss, and resolve multiple issues as well as to recognise uncertainties in expert knowledge, data, and input parameters. We show that it is possible to reconstruct the past dynamics of the food-web only if recognising that some data and assumptions are more uncertain than originally thought. According to this assessment, consumption by commercial fish and catch by fisheries jointly increased until the early 2010s, after which consumption by fish declined and catches by fisheries stabilised. On an annual basis, fish have consumed an average of 135.5 million tonnes of resources (including 9.5 million tonnes of fish), marine mammals have consumed an average of 22 million tonnes of which 50 % (11 million tonnes) were fish. Fisheries and hunting have captured an average of 4.4 million tonnes of fish and 7 thousand tonnes of marine mammals.