OS44B-01 INVITED
Crossing the Treshold: From Climate to its Human Dimensions
It is very easy to say we could deliver applications from our ocean science research that are useful and usable by other researchers in applied sciences or by the end-users. However, it is very difficult to do so, and the fact remains that most of the variables that we need to handle do not only depend on our sampling or analysis strategies but on credibility, trust and policy decisions. I will present two cases, of how we use our climate knowledge to forecast its impact on economic resources in Ecuador (from Aquaculture and Agriculture), and how policy implementation and unforeseen events forces us to rethink and re-do the forecast process. The Ecuadorian shrimp aquaculture started at the beginning of the seventies with few hundred Has., and expanded into a 150,000Has. crop area by the end of 1997. Time series analysis revealed that climate variability - from seasonal to interannual - played an important role in production, 35% being accounted for. A three-month phase lag relationship was found between wild shrimp larvae availability (the price of hatchery rear larvae was used as a proxy), and the El Niño 3 index. This relationship was used for forecasting climate variability impact upon the sector and a local oceanographic station was established in 1990 in the area where most of the larvae supply was found to monitor the in situ conditions and its relationships with the El Niño indices. However, after the 1997-1998 ENSO record yields, a disease (white spot virus syndrome) appeared along with the 1999-2000 La Niña, which not only wiped out most of the shrimp production, but together with the political crisis set up the stage for major job losses of the 8% of the economic active population that worked for this sector. Afterwards, a banned in catching wild shrimp larvae was imposed to prevent more spreading of the disease and the relationship developed to forecast climate variability impact on shrimp aquaculture was useless. Hence, a new approach was developed, and the forecast system turned into an alert and management system using a GIS, with the pre- and post-disease shrimp variables inserted into a production index, calculated from and for each individual shrimp pond. The shrimp and climate analysis is a service in place for the Gulf of Guayaquil area at www.saema.espol.edu.ec. For the agriculture case, we are working in a small river basin, in an integrated approach, applying the principles of the UNESCO-HELP program: hydrology for the environment, life and policy. Climate forecast is one its components. A climate virtual application expert system was developed. In this first phase, we are using a crossover between "weather and climate". The application is for banana farmers, and the system has knowledge of the seasonal forecast and the input from the farm meteorological station (daily data). The information feeds the system and the expert knowledge from agriculture engineers, which is already embedded in the system gives the users recommendations on irrigation, fertilization and other parameters important to maintain and/or improve banana yield. The system is still underdevelopment and has other compartments, which involved a decision system for preserving the required water quantity for its services within the basin.