Marine and coastal ecosystems provide multiple benefits that are fundamental to human wellbeing, but human actions are disrupting and impacting the Earth's ecosystems at an alarming rate. The Ecopath approach was designed to understand the impact of the wide range of anthropogenic pressures that are exerted on the oceans, and of management options for countering these, and it has over the last thirty years grown into a complex and capable modelling framework: “Ecopath with Ecosim” – with Ecospace added on. Exciting new developments of the approach are contributing to address critical and complex issues related to the health of marine ecosystems such as invasion of species, illegal fishing activities, climate change and the development of new activities (e.g., aquaculture and infrastructure development) in coastal areas. This Special Issue presents new findings from selected case studies around the world using advanced features of Ecopath with Ecosim that were presented at the International Conference “Ecopath 30 Years-Modelling ecosystem dynamics: beyond boundaries with EwE” (November 2014, Barcelona, Spain). These contributions showcase new capabilities and findings of Ecopath with Ecosim models applications. Together these papers show that a range of diverse ecological, economic, social and governance drivers are often interacting at dynamic and temporal scales to modify marine resources, which underlines that managing marine ecosystems needs a continuous effort to integrate multiple processes

SV thanks for financial support from the Galician Government (Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria, Xunta de Galicia) (Grant N° R2014/023). FAS thanks CONACYT (Grant N° 221705) and COFAA and EDI programs of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. JJH was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under the project MERP (Grant N° NE/L003279/1), Marine Ecosystems Research Programme. SL acknowledges support of the Italian RITMARE Flagship Project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research within the National Research Program 2012–2016. MC was partially funded by the European Commission through the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant Fellowships (Grant N° PCIG10-GA-2011-303534) – to the BIOWEB project

Editorial special issue Ecopath 30 years – Modelling ecosystem dynamics: beyond boundaries with EwE.-- 4 pages

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