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Having spent a few weeks surveying basic models being utilized in ecosystem simulation and one week examining current events, this week we'll move on and begin looking at some actual ecosystem simulations being carried out by scientists around the world. Our first stop is ISIMA, a French modeling institute (see http://www.isima.fr/ ), and, more specifically, the ECOSIM Web server.
Recognizing the need to facilitate collaboration and to make setting up a simulation model more intuitive for researchers, scientists at Blaise Pascal University have described a web-based technique for simulating agent behaviors. Briefly, an agent-based simulation is one which assumes that environmental phenomena can be represented as a consequences of the actions of disparate groups of "agents", or inhabitants, of the ecosystem. The entities are generally independent and separable, but their actions affect the overall environment with which all species in the ecosystem must interact. Utilizing this model, the researchers developed an ecological modeling application that acts as a virtual laboratory, allowing users to change simulation parameters on the fly. The software then provides visual feedback regarding these changes through a GUI. This type of software has been dubbed a Visual Interactive Simulation, or VIS. The developers of this program warn that a simulation carried out in such a way is generally not complete enough to allow users to draw valid scientific conclusions. Rather, the real value of these systems is in allowing scientists to zero in on a region of simulation space that is most meaningful to them. In addition to this capability, this software is Java-based and is presented as a web application, enabling scientists and/or developers from distant geographic locations to collaborate on a project. Also, because of the Java architecture, object-oriented technology and threading capability is built in. Much of this probably looks familiar to anyone familiar with scientific computing. Object-oriented design, graphical representations, collaborative ability and multithreading are buzzwords one often stumbles across in this line of study. To learn more about how these ideas were drawn together by the ECOSIM folks, check out their web site at http://www.isima.fr/~ecosim/
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The copyright of the article Ecosystem Simulation in Practice in Scientific Computing is owned by Adam Hughes. Permission to republish Ecosystem Simulation in Practice in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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