First Atlantis Summit Meeting Details

First Atlantis Summit

Atlantis summit attendees, Hawaii 2015

The first Atlantis summit ran in 2015 and was immensely enjoyable and highly productive.

These pages are left here for historic purposes.

Location:
Honolulu, Hawaii.

Summit Flyer:
PDF Flyer

Workshop Background
Many places have committed to doing Ecosystem-based management (EBM). An important part of doing EBM is the judicious use of ecosystem models. Ecosystem models require further testing and skill evaluation before they become more widely adopted in a marine resource management context. Yet the pace of their development and growth of their application warrants formal examination.

One such large, end-to-end ecosystem model is Atlantis. End-to-end models like Atlantis model the full suite of marine ecosystem dynamics, uses, management, and feedbacks thereto. Atlantis is designed as one of the very few modelling platforms that can handle “sunlight to fish markets and everything in between,” particularly linking biophysical ROM-ecology with anthropogenic modules to interface with socio-economic facets of a marine ecosystem. The uniqueness of Atlantis is that it is multisector, modular, has multiple functional forms a user can choose, and is designed particularly to address system-level Management Strategy Evaluation. Yet what the Atlantis platform needs is further development, testing and evaluation of its myriad modular approaches.

This was the first ever Atlantis Summit. There are numerous general ecosystem modelling meetings and workshops that explore some facets germane to Atlantis model development. Other modelling platforms (e.g. EwE, SS3, Osmose, ROMS) have had specific symposia or workshops. Thus, now that the Atlantis platform has similarly matured, what we aim is to have a gathering of the Atlantis modelling community.

The objectives of the summit included: help nascent Atlantis modelling efforts get up and running more quickly via dedicated time working through those models and training sessions; develop a heightened sense of community among Atlantis users and programmers by providing a forum to discuss Atlantis issues; swap best practices and tips for using and developing Atlantis, particularly developing further a “user’s manual” of best practices and identifying which modules need to be updated; establish and test Atlantis models from various ecosystems under common and consistent scenarios; provide broader feedback to the E2E and general ecosystem modelling communities; and understand the capabilities and limitations of Atlantis for contributing to global initiatives such as FISH-MIP (a global fisheries model Intercomparison exercise that will inform future IPCC assessments).

The agenda and format

Here is the agenda for the 2016 summit.

For each session of the Summit, the aim was to speak on the topic via extant examples while simultaneously demonstrating tools and packages, identifying best practices, and thinking about synthesis products.

A pre-Summit Workshop was also run on developing common and consistent testing scenarios for use of Atlantis as an operating model in an MSE context was run 4-6 December 2015 at the same location (this pre-summit will had a primarily US LMR context).

Symposium conveners: Jason Link, Beth Fulton, Erik Olsen

Scientific Steering Committee (SC): Rebecca Gorton, Marie Savina, Ingrid van Putten, Tony Smith, Mariska Weijerman, Robert Gamble, Isaac Kaplan, Sarah Gaichas, Phil Levin, Gavin Fay, Cam Ainsworth, Howard Townsend, Mette Mauritzen, Cecilie Hansen, Erik Olsen, Jason Link, Beth Fulton