Runner-up prize at University of Southampton Biology PostGrad Symposium 2013

Yesterday I presented my current work as part of the 2013 University of Southampton Biology Post-Grad Symposium. This event involved all third year PhD students presenting their work to other biology postgrad students and 2nd years presenting their work as posters. Participation was around 100 people.

Entitled "A spatially-explicit agent-based model of jaguar population dynamics", my presentation focused on the model I have just finished working on and submitted to the university as the latest chapter in the transfer report.

Aside form some technical problems which meant that I couldn't include a movie clip of my simulation in action, or some footage from a camera-trap of a jaguar at a kill, I think my talk went down quite well. Some examples slides can be seen below and the whole talk is on figshare:

As part of a small group of conservationists/ecologists within Southamptons Biology department, mine was the only talk that focused on a whole organism/ landscape-scale events. As such, I really struggled to keep up with most of the presentations and this was not made easier by the quality of talks. Most lost me with information that was too detailed and assumed too much background knowledge. Others, to be a bit harsh, had lazy structuring and I struggled to follow the progression of the talk.

Having said that, I was quite impressed by the level of work being done by PhDs at Southampton and some of the work had real potential application for disease control and treatment.

To cap it all off, I won runner-up for oral presentation!

Not bad considering I am really out of the biology 'loop'. Being based partly in Biology and partly in computer science I have never really felt at home in the mainstream biology department, but I really felt like the audience were receptive to my work and open to the idea of modelling as a useful tool for exploring population persistence issues.

All in all, I'm glad I took part and put a bit of effort into the talk and it gives me hope that my future similar talks at INTECOL2013 and ISEM2013 (hopefully) may be also well received. Talking to a room full of people has never been my strength and in the past I have really struggled with nerves so I am promoting the old adage of 'the more you practice, the better it gets'!

Conference season

Conference season is upon us again and I have 3/4 lined up already.

I'll be presenting the model as the southampton uni biology postgrad conference in 2 weeks, and the student conference on complexity science in august, as well as INTECOL2013 (where i originally proposed a poster and I got requested to present a talk instead!). I'm volunteering at this conference as well (which means free registration) so it should be an awesome event and hopefully a good networking opportunity. With only 11 months left on my PhD I have my eyes open and looking for jobs!

I've also submitted an abstract to ISEM2013 the Ecological Modelling conference being held in October in Toulouse and I should here back from them this month. I've opted to submit the paper for a special edition print of that journal so I'll also see if thats been selected. Fingers crossed!

The first spatially-explicit agent based model of jaguar population dynamics

The chapter is done! After over a year working on building and developing an agent-based model of jaguar population dynamics I have finally finished tinkering, got my results, analysed and interpreted and written up the chapter for my thesis. I officially handed it in over southampton uni's electronic tracker system yesterday and my relief was palpable!

The unofficial deadline I proposed to my supervisors back in January was 15th March(!). But of course delays and problems along the way have caused this deadline to overrun by a mere 3 months. This of course puts the rest of my thesis in a bit more jeaopardy but I feel like the last few months have been a massive learning curve and have been well worth the endless hair-pulling and 'throwing my computer out of the window' in frustration events. Sort of...

I now feel like I have a decent-ish model of the large scale population dynamics of jaguars. Territories are strongly correlated with population size which is a nice validation that things are working as expected. Territories are also pretty much the size that would be expected, although a little on the small side if truth be told. I have found it incredibly difficult to obtain a true territory-resource relationship so that territory sizes are not imbedded in the code of the model, but rather an emergent feature. I still think more work could be done here and I will continue to develop this further as time goes on and I get some more feedback from a larger variety of people.

Some results from my model are shown below. Population size is reduced within the first 10 years and then stabilises. 

Territory sizes of males (blue) and females (red) increases with smaller population sizes.

Territory sizes increase over the first 10-20 years and then stabilise. The decreasing trend correlates with the increasing trend in population size.

A snapshot of the simulation after the first 3 years showing clear territories of individuals (coloured areas - different colours equate to different individuals) - all shown on a habitat map of the area.

A full map of the landscape used can be seen below showing a range of different habitats, the outline of the protected area and the camera traps.

Validation of the model with field data was a bit iffy at first glance. Field data captured 191 jaguar sightings, the model captured an average of 5 per data collected period. But discrepancies are mainly due to the models inability to capture the fine-scale social-oriented movement of individuals. In the real world males are known for making 'information-gathering' expeditions along trails to find out who has been around and when, with sub-adult males known to follow older male for short periods. This has not been included in the model, but its generally thought to be a non-fitness function and not thought to affect territory dynamics or the contact/interactions between individuals.

I can't of course display all the results and discussion from the model outputs just yet as I'm currently trying to update the chapter for submission to a publication. Once its been submitted and reviewed I will then make it openly available! 

Open-source information for all.