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Team:St Andrews/Modelling
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Revision as of 22:35, 18 September 2012
Modelling ω-3 human-availability
Investigating Past, Present and Future Supply and Demand
Our Model 101
We sought to model fish population depletion. We succeeded. The result: unless we work together on a global scale and make drastic changes to our fishing habits, only a fraction of the total fish population that existed in 1950 will be present in our oceans by 2100. The work of our team in the laboratory - the creation of Omega-3 using E.coli - could be exactly the measure necessary to save our oceans.
Our approach: we took one of a multitude of different possible approaches to population modelling and our project can be broken down into approximately four different stages:
1) Real World Data: we performed meta-analysis to obtain information about the variation of total fish biomass in our oceans over time. We scaled our result to Villy Christensen’s (University of British Columbia) prediction of total fish biomass for 1950. We, thus, created a time series of total fish biomass in our oceans between 1950 and 2006. We believe our time series to be one of the first of its kind and certainly one of the first to be generated, largely, from real world data.
2) Mathematical Model: we hypothesised a differential equation model which we believe incorporates the key features responsible for fish population growth and decline. Our final model takes into account recruitment of fish into the adult fish population, death of adult fish due to fishing and death of adult fish due to natural causes.
3) Model Tuning: we changed the parameters in our model until its predictions closely replicated the real world fish biomass data.
4) Model Predictions: content that our model could predict fish biomass in the past and present, we enabled our model to forecast future fish biomass. We discuss how alternative sources of omega three could influence this outcome.
