22.5.12

Other people using ABMS for spatially explicit ecological modelling

I recently went to a talk by Lael Parrot who was visiting Southampton University for the week. Not a name I had heard of before but I'm quite surprised at this now considering she is involved in very similar work to me!

The most relevant paper I found from her was the one she talked about at the seminar she gave:

Anwar, S.M., Jeanneret, C.A., Parrot, L. & Marceau, D.J. (2007) Conceptualization and implementation of a multi agent model to simulate whale-wathcing tours in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec, Canada. Environmental Modelling and Software 22 1775-1787.

Not only was this paper spatially explicit and employed agent-based modelling, but it was done using the Repast Simphony toolkit!! Finally, an ecological example of someone doing a peer-reviewed and published piece of research using Repast.

I've not yet management to dive into the paper in depth but some of the simulations Lael showed during her talk have me very impressed - linking the repast output with GIS data and creating some pretty good looking 3D models of the system. They also re-integrated the model output with the original GIS data to do some spatial analysis and statistics, so I wonder whether this might also be my best option... definitely something to look into in more detail.

Its a much bigger model than mine will be so I have no doubt that I'll be able to pick up some interesting tips from Lael and the paper. I'll report back with any useful bits of information.

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