Ecological and economic analyses of marine ecosystems in the Bird's Head Seascape, Papua, Indonesia: II

Edited by Megan Bailey and Tony J. Pitcher

This report being a sequel to ‘Ecological and Economic Analyses of Marine Ecosystems in the Bird’s Head Seascape, Papua, Indonesia I’ (2007), the first question we should ask is what the original report was, in terms of sequence. We do know that it was not a prequel: this clearly was ‘Historical Ecology of the Raja Ampat Archipelago, Papua Province, Indonesia’, i.e., FCRR 14(7), published in 2006.

Thus, a new name (technically a retronym) is needed for the original which spawns the sequel(s). My suggestion is ‘urquel’, from ‘ur’, i.e., ‘first’ or ‘original’ in German, and Quell(e), a source, also in German, which should satisfy philologists, Germanophiles and cerevisaphiles.

Now to the sequel. The nice thing about models is once you have them they become attractors for more and better data. This is the case here: an ecosystem model has been generated for the marine part of Raja Ampat, in spite of this being one of the most remote regions of the world, as elaborated upon in the …urquel.

Now, having this model, it has become possible for the authors of the four papers in this report to generate another round of hypotheses that they can test and scenarios that they can run – again: all of this in an area that a few years ago was supposed to be devoid of data and not amenable to study using ecosystem modeling. This is fantastic.

I am also pleased that the questions and scenarios that are run are not exclusively biological ones, i.e., ‘what would happen to predators and prey if species x were fished more heavily’. Rather economic questions are being posed of the management implications of various scenarios, which are obviously the ones that will appeal the most to policy-makers.


Daniel Pauly
Director, Fisheries Centre

 

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