MetOceanTrack: A desktop GUI to simulate the dispersal of invasive species in coastal and continental shelf regions

The potential biohazardarising from invasive marine species is of considerable concern to nations around the world. To address this issue in New Zealand, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed for use by scientists at the Ministry for Primary Industries, allowing them to simulate the dispersal of propagulesof various invasive species within New Zealand coastal areas. The GUI uses a Lagrangian particle trackingmodel that considers a range of biological properties within the environment, simulating the release and behaviour of planktonic organisms within the marine environment. The properties considered are temperature and salinity tolerances, as well as the dial vertical migration. The model also allows for a succession of planktonic life stages, during the simulation. Historical simulations can be made within a 10- year hindcastof the nation-wide hydrodynamics. This hindcastis resolved on a finite-element grid and extends seamlessly from all the major harbours out to beyond the continental shelf. The GUI allows nonmodellers to rapidly run complex multi-year simulations and the results can be immediately visualized as particle dispersion animations or as density probability heat maps. The environmental forcing data can also be viewed in the time domain. There is an export facility so the results can be shared with other GIS software or Google Earth. The tool allows ready examination of possible propaguletrajectories from nearshore and estuarine environments that are tidally dominated to the coastal and shelf regions that are more influenced by the non-tidal and wind-driven flows. The tool can be used for the rapid assessment of the connectivity for both passive and active particles, as well as longer term studies on the dispersal of biological and inert particles. The GUI and hindcastflow fields are freely available for use in academic research.