Abstract
One of the most important and continuously growing research areas in marine ecology is assessing the sustainability of ecosystems. The concept is traditionally approached by quantifying different anthropogenic pressures, such as top-down effects, overexploitation, invasive species, overfishing, and pollution. However, this perspective has been criticized for its inability to capture the complex interactions between natural factors (such as climate change), human factors, and sociopolitical factors that shape ecosystems. In this paper, we present a new structural model for assessing the sustainability of marine ecosystems, PCA-DEA-based model, as an extension to current models that incorporates these key interfaces into dynamic system modeling by including trade-offs on horizontal scales (e.g., decision making).