Marine ecosystems and their services are under pressure due to changing climatic conditions and human exploitation (such as fisheries). Our ability to understand, predict and mitigate the effects of these stressors on marine ecosystems and their key species, is dependent in part upon the application of modelling tools, in particular coupled atmosphere-ocean-ecosystem models. While modern marine ecosystem models take advantage of the enormous increase in computational power over the last 40 years and the increase in our mechanistic understanding of processes occurring within marine ecosystems, they suffer from weaknesses resulting from the parameterisations employed to model unresolved processes (e.g., Anderson, 2005; Flynn, 2005; Frangoulis et al., 2010). These weaknesses limit the robustness, realism and predictive capability of model solutions and must be addressed as we take on the challenge of modelling ecosystems from "End to End" (E2E), (e.g., Travers et al., 2007; Fulton, 2009; Maury, 2010). Hence, a critical examination of our approaches to ecosystem and process modelling is necessary. Without such an examination our ability to understand and model the dynamics of marine ecosystems and their component species will not advance and our approaches will remain, in the terms of Flynn (2010), dysfunctional.

The authors would like to thank the IGBP programs IMBER and GLOBEC as well as the EU funded network of Excellence EUROCEANS for their sponsorship of the meeting.

5 páginas,1 figura, 1 tabla. Special Issue: Parameterisation of Trophic Interactions in Ecosystem Modelling

Peer reviewed