Dynamic Energy Budget Modelling in Aquatic Ecosystems

Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) modelling provides a unified framework to describe how aquatic organisms acquire and allocate energy for maintenance, growth, development and reproduction. Grounded in thermodynamic principles, this approach captures organismal bioenergetics across life stages under variable environmental conditions. By parameterising species-specific traits—such as assimilation efficiency, somatic maintenance costs and metabolic acceleration—DEB models quantify life-history responses to changes in temperature, food availability and other stressors. These models facilitate comparisons across taxa, revealing how energy budgets scale with body size, trophic strategy and evolutionary history. In aquatic ecosystems, DEB modelling has been instrumental in assessing the physiological impacts of climate change, optimising aquaculture design through spatially explicit simulations, and forecasting population dynamics under resource variability. Its ability to link individual performance with ecosystem processes underscores the global significance of DEB applications in conservation, fisheries management and sustainable aquaculture.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have extended DEB applications to environments characterised by steep temporal and spatial gradients, demonstrating enhanced predictive capacity under fluctuating tidal, temperature and food regimes. By incorporating tidal emersion and metabolic depression mechanisms into DEB formulations, researchers have achieved closer alignment between predicted and observed growth trajectories of intertidal mussel species across the rocky shore. This work emphasises the importance of resolving fine-scale environmental variability in mechanistic models and provides a template for integrating long-term change into ecological forecasting.

Dynamic Energy Budget Modelling in Aquatic Ecosystems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in dynamic energy budget modelling in aquatic ecosystems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) model: A mechanistic framework linking an organism’s energy acquisition and utilisation throughout its life cycle, accounting for processes such as maintenance, growth, development and reproduction.

Functional response: The relationship between the rate of resource intake by an organism and resource availability.

Metabolic depression: A reversible reduction in metabolic rate allowing organisms to withstand unfavourable conditions such as desiccation or food scarcity.

Spatio-temporal representation: The mapping of model outputs across geographic and temporal scales to illustrate patterns in organism performance or ecosystem processes.

Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA): A system combining species from different trophic levels to recycle nutrients and improve environmental sustainability.

References

1. DEBEcoMod: A dynamic energy budget R tool to predict life-history traits of marine organisms across time and space. Ecological Informatics (2024).
2. Towards environmentally friendly finfish farming: A potential for mussel farms to compensate fish farm effluents. Journal of Applied Ecology (2023).
3. A dynamic energy budget model for small yellow croaker Larimichthys polyactis: Parameterisation and application in its main geographic distribution waters. Ecological Modelling (2020).
4. Applicability of Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models across steep environmental gradients. Scientific Reports (2018).