Ecopath

Ecopath with Ecosim

Developer(s)	Ecopath Research and Development Consortium
Initial release	1992
Stable release	6.5 / 7 July 2016
Preview release	6.5 Beta / 16 May 2016
Development status	Released, active
Written in	Visual Basic.NET, C#
Operating system	Windows (EwE desktop version), Unix and Linux (EwE core via Mono)
Platform	.NET Framework 4
Available in	English
Type	Ecosystem modeling
License	GPL v2
Website	http://www.ecopath.org

Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) is a free ecosystem modelling software suite, initially started at NOAA by Jeffrey Polovina, but has since primarily been developed at the UBC Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia. In 2007, it was named as one of the ten biggest scientific breakthroughs in NOAA’s 200-year history. The NOAA citation states that Ecopath “revolutionized scientists’ ability worldwide to understand complex marine ecosystems”. Behind this lie more than two decades of development work in association with Villy Christensen, Carl Walters, Daniel Pauly, and other fisheries scientists, followed with the provision of user support, training and co-development collaborations. Per January 2012 there are 6000+ registered users in 150+ countries.

EwE has three main components:

The Ecopath software package can be used to:

The desktop version of Ecopath with Ecosim runs only on Windows and requires Microsoft Access database drivers version 2007 or newer. The computational core of Ecopath with Ecosim can be executed on other operating systems such as Unix or Linux using the Mono common language runtime.

Development Ecopath version 6 received support from the and the Pew Charitable trusts. In 2011 the Ecopath Research and Development Consortium was founded to share the responsibility of maintaining and further developing the approach with institutions around the world.