Climate change will produce major shifts in the productivity of the world’s fisheries, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics. This will affect ocean food supply throughout the world, particularly in the tropics. This image shows the change in maximum catch potential (percent change relative to 2005) from 2005 to 2055 in each ½ x ½ degree cell under one of the climate change scenarios described by this study. Image courtesy the Sea Around Us project. Click on map to enlarge.

There are several independant projects studying things such as climate change, the decline in the the world’s fisheries, and the effects upon our food supply — such as the map above from the Sea Around Us project.

But how do you bring all this source material together into one centralized, coordinated place? How can you produce computer-generated, reproducible range maps for all the species of fish we catch and eat, using available data and a transparent, easily understandable and modifiable approach, so maps can be reviewed and improved by species experts?

(Especially when some of the scenarios about the effects of climate change upon marine fisheries require billions of computations?)

D4Science will explore these issues and more, at its World User Meeting in Rome, held at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization. The meeting will elaborate upon the use of such tools as AquaMaps (previously covered in our “Plenty more fish in the sea?” story in the 24 June 2009 issue of iSGTW), which gives researchers working on the environment access to multidisciplinary data sources and chain workflow processes, enables control of data sharing and collaborative reporting, and provides access to GRID Infrastructure, storage and computing powers to all regional fisheries bodies.

More about the two-day long meeting can be seen on the agenda. Be sure to see our upcoming blogs about the event on GridCast.