MSP Challenge 2050 food web review

The MSP Challenge 2050 serious game is being developed with the aim to provide maritime spatial planners the means to assess the environmental consequences of planning decisions in the marine and coastal ecosystem in space and time. The structure of the food web embedded in the MSP Challenge 2050 is a simplification of an EwE model of the North Sea (Mackinson and Daskalov, 2007), and model logic is loosely based on the Ecosim temporal model.

This review has been commissioned to answer four questions:
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the current food web model in the MSP Challenge 2050?
2. Is it correct that once the ecosystem in the food web model starts displaying a dropping trend, it is difficult to counter this trend? What could be done to fix this?
3. What type of (spatial) measures could enable players to benefit the ecosystem?
4. Other suggestions.
This review contains suggestions for modifications of the MSP Challenge 2050 software to mitigate problems. Please note that these suggestions, unless explicitly stated, aim to address structural computational issues without making the game more complex to play.