Department Systems Analysis, Integrated Assessment and Modelling

In this project, we are testing core ecological hypotheses about the distributions of species’ abundances over space and how these might change under future climate scenarios. The abundant-centre hypothesis is a core idea in ecology that posits that species are more abundant in the centre of their geographic or climatic ranges. Using spatially explicit catch time series from scientific bottom-trawl surveys collated through the FISHGLOB consortium, we are modelling groundfish abundance patterns using advanced point-process modelling techniques to test predictions of the abundant-centre hypothesis. This work is being done in collaboration with colleagues at the Scottish Association for Marine Science and Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland.