Ecotroph

Description

EcoTroph (ET) is a modelling approach articulated around the idea that an ecosystem can be represented by its biomass distribution across trophic levels. Such an approach, wherein species as such disappear, may be regarded as the ultimate stage in the use of the trophic level metric for ecosystem modelling. By concentrating on biomass flow as a quasi-physical process, it allows aspects of ecosystem functioning to be explored which are complementary to EwE. It provides users with simple tools to quantify the impacts of fishing at an ecosystem scale and a new way of looking at ecosystems. It thus appears a useful complement to Ecopath.

In September 2011 a new version of the Ecoptroph approach was released by Agrocampus Ouest. This version was implemented as a package in the popular R software. A new version of the Ecotroph plug-in for EwE, released in May 2012 and compatible with EwE version 6.2, requires this R package and the R software to be present on a users' system and particulary in the Ecopath directory.

Downloads

Note that the plug-in provided here is only compatible with the current release of EwE6.

• EwE Plug-in (requires R and R package - download at the first use)

Deployment

Extract the files in the provided zip file, and copy ecotroph.dll and unzip.exe to the Ecopath executable directory. When restarting Ecopath the plug-in will be recognized and loaded. In order to run the Ecotroph calculations you will need the R and the EcoTroph R package. When you will load EcoTroph plugin for the first time, it will allow you to download the R_ET.zip file wich provide a minimal R installation for the EcoTroph package. Then each time you'll load the plug-in it will test if a new version of the R package is available (on then CRAN projet) . For documentation, please refer to the documentation pages in the Agrocampus Ouest website.

Support

With questions regarding the workings of Ecotroph please refer to the documentation pages in the Agrocampus Ouest website or contact Didier Gascuel.