Building bridges between global information systems on marine organisms and ecosystem models

To facilitate the wider implementation of ecosystem modeling platforms and, thereby, to help advance ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) worldwide, tools delivering a large quantity of inputs to ecosystem models are needed. We developed a web application providing OSMOSE ecosystem models with values for trophic, growth and reproduction parameters derived from data from two global information systems (FishBase and SeaLifeBase). Our web application guides the user through simple queries to extract information from FishBase and SeaLifeBase data archives, and it delivers all the configuration files necessary for running an OSMOSE model. Here, we present our web application and demonstrate it for the West Florida Shelf ecosystem. Our software architecture can serve as a basis for designing other advanced web applications using FishBase and SeaLifeBase data in support of EBFM.