EwERunConsole - automated and reproducible executions of Ecopath with Ecosim

Ecopath with Ecosim or EwE is the most widely used ecosystem modelling approach, representing food web dynamics under influence of human and environmental change. A continued criticism to the EwE approach is that automated model executions require coding in .NET. As marine sciences predominantly work with data analysis platforms such as R, a bridge between the two environments is needed that ideally requires no coding in unfamiliar programming languages.Building on earlier successful bridges (e.g., Vilas D, Buszowski J, Sagarese S, Steenbeek J, Siders Z, Chagaris D. Evaluating red tide effects on the West Florida Shelf using a spatiotemporal ecosystem modeling framework. Scientific Reports. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2541), we have started construing a modern, modular automation pipeline to control the orchestrate and control the repeated execution of EwE models via simple text files that can be written with any programming languge. With this pipeline, the repeated execution of EwE can be integrated into any analytical framework without any coding in .NET. The file shown here is the first user guide. We reserve the right to overhaul the JSON file format and/or adding additional formats (YAML, XML, etc). The EwERunConsole is a work in progress for the foreseeable future. Please contact ewedevteam@gmail.com to join the club.