Workshop on fourth generation ecosystem overviews (WKEO4; outputs from 2025 meeting)

Ecosystem Overviews (EOs) are central products in the ICES approach to support Ecosystem Based Management, through providing the ecoregion context, identifying main pressures, associated human activities and impacts on ecosystem state. The Workshop on fourth generation ecosystem overviews (WKEO4) reviewed and updated priority topic lists for the EOs, discussed and advanced climate change impacts, and social and economic context sections in the EOs, and developed recommendations on how to improve the utility of EOs to meet advisory and decision-making needs. The workshop proposed the following five priority topics to be included/advanced in EOs: effects of climate change, foresight (with a focus on spatial analyses), cumulative effects, biodiversity and functional diversity, and trade-offs between ecological, social and economic sustainability. These priorities reflect a consensus to update EOs from static, descriptive summaries into dynamic, integrated, and operational tools that explicitly link ecosystem information and advice to options for management responses. Workshop discussions also highlighted the need for stronger connections between ecological and social information, improved visual and spatial presentation of results, and greater alignment with international and regional policy frameworks such as the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, OSPAR, and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Participants also discussed the need to more systematically adopt available workflow resources (e.g. Transparent Assessment Framework), interactive delivery platforms (e.g. ICES Xplorer suite), and novel methodologies applied within ICES (e.g. Spatial Cumulative Assessment of Impact Risk for Management). Doing so would help transition EOs towards a more modular structure, where sections can be updated more readily with self-contained methods, code, and analyses. With this, we aim to streamline EO updates and enable EOs to transition into an online application. Further work should include workshops on: i) societal/management objectives to support EOs, ii) developing guidance on social and economic data collection, use and documentation, iii) revised risk assessment methodology and a follow-up benchmark (Workshop on methods and guidelines to link human activities, pressures and state of the ecosystem in Ecosystem Overviews 2 (WKTRANSPARENT2)), and iv) Fifth Generation EOs (WKEO5).

Keywords

Fisheries Aquaculture Climate changes impacts Biodiversity Ecosystem overviews Ecosystem functions Human dimension ecosystem based management (EBM) cumulative effects