DETERMINING SYSTEM CARRYING CAPACITY FOR SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT USING AN INTEGRATED ECOLOGICAL-ECONOMIC MODELING FRAMEWORK  

Sustainable resource management necessitates a whole systems approach to investigate how complex ecological processes and the socioeconomic drivers shape human-environment interactions. To better understand complex interconnections among ecological and economic systems, our study uses a coastal marine ecosystem model coupled with a model of the associated coastal economy (Fig. 1). Through simulations of different ecological and socioeconomic scenarios, the integrated model can be used to generate predictive ecological and economic values for policy analysis, providing an opportunity for more rational and informed debate concerning sustainable marine resource development. The utility of this integrated model was first demonstrated when it was applied to coastal shellfish aquaculture production in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, a coastal ecological-economic system that provides important ecosystem services and contributes to the regional economy. In Narragansett Bay, the model highlighted the potential for farmed bivalve harvests to increase over 600 times without exceeding the ecological carrying capacity.

Because sustainable coastal resource management is a global concern, we test the transferability and utility of this model to inform sustainable resource management practices in another system: Cobscook Bay, Maine, US. Cobscook Bay is a coastal area that is rich in natural resources, a diverse coastal economy, and exhibits user conflict issues. Demonstrating transferability of the integrated model in another coastal ecosystem at the local scale is an important step toward large-scale model implementation in other ecosystem types.