The first part of the article provides an overview of the theoretical evidence, the main provisions, and the implementation strategy of information support for bioresource and ecosystem research in the north-west Pacific, which has been conducted over the past 20 years in the Russian Far East Research Institute TINRO-Center. In short, the concept consists of a combination of the following four assertions: 1) For the steady and sustainable development of the Russian Far East, the entire Russian Federation and the Asia-Pacific Region in general, environmental, food, economic, and other security is required, which cannot be achieved without the rational use of bioresources based on the ecosystem approach to the management of aquatic bioresources. 2) For the inventory, appraisal, monitoring, forecasting of the state of and management the natural water resources when applying this approach, statistically relevant quantitative information is required on the greatest possible number of constituents of marine biocenosis of the north-western Pacific for the longest possible period of time, which is only available at the TINRO-Center. 3) This valuable data should be organized into databases, based on which geo-information and other electronic information systems are prepared, and based on these map atlases and reference books on natural water resources, using automated workplaces created especially for this. 4) The resulting unique information support will be of great value not only for practical purposes, but also for science, both applied and fundamental. Next comes a summary of the many years of work on the practical implementation of this concept and the key achievements in this field obtained by the TINRO-Center by the end of 2015 are reviewed. At the end, some plans for the near future are outlined.
Lately, the special role that the Far Eastern seas play in Russia’s economy is associated with the discovery of large offshore hydrocarbon reserves, the construction and reconstruction of ports and other coastal production plants, and the building of oil and gas pipelines along the coast and sea bottom [
The study of aquatic biological resources (ABR) in the vast area of the north-west Pacific is one of the main jobs of the Federal State Budgetary Scientific Institution “Pacific Research Fisheries Center” (TINRO-Center). This institute adheres to the ecosystem approach regarding the study and management of ABR [
Every expedition provides a huge amount of bioresource and environmental information, the compilation and interpretation of which is impossible without compressing it into a format available for analysis by preliminary statistical and cartographic processing on a computer. Modern standardized methods of collecting and processing data require the use of automated workplaces (AW), the accumulation and storage of materials―da- tabases (DB) and their management systems (DBMS), as well as the information systems of the next level― knowledge bases (KB), which operate based not on the original data but on the results of mathematical pro- cessing, in particular geographic information systems (GIS) and other electronic reference systems (ERS) (see, for example [
It is crucially important that the stated concept is inextricably linked to a whole set of other fundamental ideas and documents of our times (
The effective protection of rare and endangered species, the preservation of biodiversity, the fight to reduce environmental pollution, including biological (invasive species), regulated fishing, particularly multi-species fishing, and the artificial reproduction of aquatic and land reclamation habitats are possible only within the framework of the ecosystem approach to the study and management of bioresources. This approach is a component of the concept of rational use of natural resources [
Specialists in this interdisciplinary field say that bioresource exploitation, which leads to exhaustion and even extinction of bioresources, environmental pollution, and ecological imbalance of natural systems, i.e. an environmental crisis or a catastrophe, is considered irrational (unsustainable) [
sources and the environment so that it can regenerate quickly and taking into account the long-term interests of the developing economy and the protection of human health.” [
Rational environmental exploitation, in turn, is a prerequisite for environmental security. According to the definition adopted in Russia (Federal Law No. 7-FZ “On Environmental Protection”, dated 10/01/2002 (ed. dated 25/06/2012)), environmental security means the environment and the vital interests of people protected from the possible negative impact of economic and other activities, natural and man-made disasters and their consequences. To ensure environmental security in this region, in 2007, the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FEB RAS), together with a number of other scientific and industrial organizations, developed a comprehensive program called “Modern environmental safety technologies for the Far Eastern seas for the sustainable socio-economic development of the Far East and Russia and effective Russian geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific region” [
Now let us direct our attention to the fact that this implies the need to respect all possible aspects of security associated with the environment, for the sustainable development of the Far East, Russia, Asia-Pacific, etc. In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) officially recognized the harm in the traditional ways of developing the global community, which has been described as unsustainable development, fraught with crises, catastrophes, and the death of all living things. A definition from the Brundt- land Report “Our Common Future” [
From everything stated above, it is evident that long-term, continuous, sustainable development requires security, which cannot be achieved without environmental exploitation based on the ecosystem approach to the management of ABR.
To find solutions to a variety of related tasks, a set of measures must be implemented (see
Let us note, however, that none of the above-mentioned policy and regulatory documents, such as the proposed set of measures by FEB RAS (see [
It was mentioned above that among the main applied tasks of this institution is the monitoring and forecasting of the state of the resource base of domestic fisheries, and any estimates and projections, be they model or expert, are always based on certain quantity of data―the actual observation of natural phenomena and processes. The rule usually applies that the more raw data, the better the prognosis. For example, the statistical analysis of cyclical fluctuations in populations requires a time series analyses of observations that is at least 2 times longer than the duration of one cycle (see, for example [
However, when creating a new database for the information support of not only the bioresource, but ecosystem studies, it is necessary to collate not just the maximum amount of expedition data or a series of observations for as long as possible of an individual dominant and commercial species, but only the data that contains complete details of all marine and ocean biocenotic groups without exception. Such data is required for the rational use of biological resources and their ecosystem-based management, since the population of commercial species do not live in isolation, but within communities (biocenosis). The biocenologic background for them is the same habitat as the hydrological regime. This is important to understand and predict changes to the state of biological resources in general and also the fisheries resource base [
The acquisition of expedition data that satisfies these requirements, from all possible sources should lead to the creation of a minimum of three databases: the pelagic and bottom trawl macrofauna and net zooplankton― mesofauna (
by a trawler equipped with a fine-meshed insertion from 10 - 12-millimeter netting. Macrofauna includes commercial animals, and their food, predators, competitors, parasites, symbionts, etc. Mesofauna, caught by a plank- ton net are organisms with a lower body size and weighing hundredths or thousandths of a milligram―mostly the food supply and larvae of invertebrates and fish. The largest animals―megafauna―if we do not count sharks and giant squid, are whales weighing several tons. These as well as other mammals and sea birds play an important role in ecosystems [
Following the organization of the DB, the natural step is to create high quality information products based on it―KB about the ABR, which will contain not the original raw data but the results of their statistical and cartographic analysis (see
Naturally, this work requires the development of AW―specialized software systems (see
Briefly, CIS is formulated in the form of four main provisions:
1. For the steady sustainable development of the Far East, Russia, and the Asia-Pacific region, environmental, food, economic (etc.) security is required, which cannot be achieved without the rational use of bioresources based on the ecosystem approach to the management of ABR.
2. For the inventory, appraisal, monitoring, forecasting of the state of and management the ABR when applying this approach, statistically relevant quantitative information is required on the greatest possible number of constituents of marine biocenosis of the north-western Pacific for the longest possible period of time, which is only available at the TINRO-Center.
3. This valuable information should be organized in DB, on which basis the GIS and ERS are prepared, and based on them ABR map atlases and reference books, using an AW especially created for this.
4. The resulting unique information support will be of great value not only for practical purposes, but also for science, both applied and fundamental.
More information about the history, the main results and prospects of CIS were recently published in the journal “Trudy VNIRO” in a series of three large papers [
To date, the TINRO-Center has created all the AW shown in
By themselves, the two first databases during the implementation of CIS were the starting point for many methodological innovations, and they played a key role in identifying a number of general ecological and biogeographical regularities, including those with important applied implications for fisheries (for examples of numerous articles, monographs and dissertations, which would not have been possible to write without these databases, see [
In 2003-2014, the TINRO-Center published 12 monographs―reference books [
200 - 300, 300 - 500, 500 - 700, 700 - 1000 and 1000 - 2000 m. For the well-studied abundant species, all the information is given separately for three size-age groups: small/larva, medium/juveniles and large/adults. In the final lines of the tables for the pelagic macrofauna the total abundance of fish, cephalopods, crustaceans, nekton, jellyfish, comb jellies, nudibranch and all macrofauna are listed, and for the bottom macrofauna―all fish, gastropods, bivalves, shrimps and prawns, crabs and king crabs, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and comb jellies, all invertebrates and all macrofauna are listed. Together, they provide the opportunity to measure the population density and gross stocks (as well as its seasonal and inter-annual changes) of any of the ABR of the Far Eastern Seas and the North-Western Pacific Ocean. What is important is that all the tables contain detailed information not only on commercial and potentially commercial animals, but also about their biocenotic environment―all the other species―from dominant to indicator, endemic, rare and endangered. This is a unique basis for future comparisons in monitoring the ecosystems of the north-western Pacific, which is especially important in view of global climate change, and the above-mentioned expansion of oil and gas exploration on the shelf of the region.
In October 2015 at the 24th Annual Conference of The North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES), the series from these twelve monographs and reference books was awarded the prestigious international award “PICES Ocean Monitoring Service Award (POMA)” (http://www.pices.int/awards/POMA_award/2015-POMA/2015-POMA.aspx). For the first time in the history of the organization, Russian scientists were recognised for their significant contribution to the study of the North Pacific. The official website of the Federal Agency for Fisheries of the Russian Federation states in this regard (http://www.fish.gov.ru/press-tsentr/novosti/8522-mnogoletnie-issledovaniya-uchenykh-tinro-zasluzhili-priznanie-mezhdunarodnogo-nauchnogo-soobshchestva-pices): “Our foreign colleagues recognize that such comprehensive ecosystem research is not regularly conducted by any Pacific power, and no country has a database of this scale other than Russia. This allows Russia and, in particular, the TINRO-Center to play an important role in the study of the Pacific Ocean and the inventory management of its biological resources.”
In continuation of the CIS implementation, at the end of 2015, five new similar reference books on net zooplankton [
With sufficient funding to perform the CIS work, it is expected to resume publication of the pelagic and bottom macrofauna atlases in new formats―so that each map displays not only one sea or the north-western Pacific (as in the first atlases [
In addition, for several years present-day and historical data has been added to the database “Observations of marine mammals”, but it is not yet available and therefore not shown in
The next step is to create a new large database of trophic ecology, as during the comprehensive marine expeditions undertaken by the TINRO-Center, quantitative analyses are performed of the stomach contents of the catch. This data is, unfortunately, not centrally stored in a common format (which is why there is also no such corresponding database in
Igor V.Volvenko, (2016) The Concept of Information Support for Bi-oresource and Ecosystem Research in the North-West Pacific: Theory and Practical Implementation. Natural Resources,07,40-50. doi: 10.4236/nr.2016.71004