Third Workshop on Integrated Trend Analysis to Support Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (WKINTRA3)

The overall aim of the workshops on Integrated Trend Analysis to support Integrated Ecosystem Assessment is to develop good practices in the application of integrated trend analyses (ITA) and interpretation of their results for integrated ecosystem assessment (IEA). This series of workshops follow a simulation-based evaluation approach.

The third workshop (WKINTRA3) was dedicated to the review of simulated multivariate ecologi-cal "control" datasets, which were further used to evaluate the following selection of ITA meth-ods: heatmaps, principal component analysis (PCA), integrated resilience analysis (IRA), multi-variate autoregressive trend models (MAR-T), trend estimation and classification (TREC), mini-mum/maximum autocorrelation factor analysis (MAFA), redundancy discriminant analysis (RDA) and dynamics factor analysis (DFA).

Based on the ITA evaluation results, several recommendations are made for further development and use of ITA to support the work of ICES IEA groups. These recommendations include 1) clear specification of the objective when applying ITA methods, 2) increased transparency and tracea-bility of the methods used, 3) explicit consideration of input data uncertainties, 4) methods for detecting extreme events (such as heatwaves), 5) harmonisation in the reporting of ITA outputs, 6) generalisation of the evaluation of ITA method performance and 7) peer-reviewing of ITA methods across IEA groups.