Linking ecology and the economy with models and scenarios to estimate shellfish food production potential

Coastal ecosystems provide a variety of ecosystem services for humans. As such, ecosystems are increasingly viewed as social-ecological systems (SES); in this approach, human livelihood is often explicitly and tightly coupled to the structure and function of ecosystems. In this Ignite talk, we will provide a brief overview of our efforts to consider the ecological and economic potential for shellfish production for human consumption. Our approach involved modeling ecosystem energy flow, generating shellfish production scenarios, and modeling the economic potential of each shellfish production scenario. We will present results of these scenarios and discuss future research directions.