The goal of this MASTS Working Group is to find new common ground between movement ecologists and ocean modellers looking at the same food chains but with opposite orientations: from top predators looking down, from lower trophic levels looking up. 

There is a long tradition of efforts to relate behaviour and change in mobile marine predator populations to change in underlying climate and ocean drivers—or conversely, to translate what we know about the past and future of ocean physics and plankton into implications for migration, movement, and population resilience in fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. However, making these leaps across trophic levels almost never works as well as it seems it ought to.

Key Objectives

• Organisation of a cycle of focused “data residencies” and wider community meetings to facilitate broad, multidisciplinary discussions (biologists, marine modellers, mathematicians and computer scientists) in order to develop roadmaps and proposal-writing teams for new technical approaches.
• Data synthesis in small groups that aims to learn something new about mobile predators (seabirds in winter, wild salmon) from their mismatch with the energyscape, in order to clarify what aspects of their biology we actually need new models for.
• Sharing of preliminary results and encouragement of other MASTS colleagues to develop mini-projects with parallel aims, but also to dig deeper into model-methods development.