Re-evaluating Primary Biotic Resource Use for Marine Biomass Production: A New Calculation Framework.
The environmental impacts of biomass harvesting can be quantified through the amount of net primary production required to produce one unit of harvested biomass (SPPR-specific primary production required). This paper presents a new calculation framework that explicitly takes into account full food web complexity and shows that the resulting SPPR for toothed whales in the Icelandic marine ecosystem is 2.8 times higher than the existing approach based on food web simplification. In addition, we show that our new framework can be coupled to food web modeling to examine how uncertainty on ecological data and processes can be accounted for while estimating SPPR. This approach reveals that an increase in the degree of heterotrophy by flagellates from 0% to 100% results in a two-fold increase in SPPR estimates in the Barents Sea. It also shows that the estimated SPPR is between 3.9 (herring) and 5.0 (capelin) times higher than that estimated when adopting food chain theory. SPPR resulting from our new approach is only valid for the given time period for which the food web is modeled and cannot be used to infer changes in SPPR when the food web is altered by changes in human exploitation or environmental changes.
Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Research Group EnVOC, Ghent University , Coupure Links 653, Ghent B-9000, Belgium.|Department of Environmental Management, Faculty of Environment, Vietnam National University of Agriculture , Hanoi 10000, Vietnam.
Anh D
AD
Luong
Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Research Group EnVOC, Ghent University , Coupure Links 653, Ghent B-9000, Belgium.
Thomas
T
Schaubroeck
Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Research Group EnVOC, Ghent University , Coupure Links 653, Ghent B-9000, Belgium.|European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Sustainability Assessment Unit , Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, Varese, Italy.
Jo
J
Dewulf
Research Unit in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Université de Namur , Rue de Bruxelles, 61, Namur 5000, Belgium.
Frederik
F
De Laender
D000818:Animals; D059001:Aquatic Organisms; D018533:Biomass; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology; D020387:Food Chain; D006801:Humans; D007055:Iceland; D008386:Marine Biology / Q000379:methods; D008954:Models, Biological; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D014907:Whales / Q000502:physiology