Development of a Spatial Landscape Simulation Suite
Team members: David Hiebeler, Frank Drummond, Jim Wilson, Charlene Donohue
The central goal of the project is to improve awareness of some SSI-related issues among the general population, primarily by targeting K-12 students and teachers and engaging them in hands-on exploration of these issues via computer simulation models. These models will also be made publicly available on the web to anyone interested in exploring them.
Specific topics we hope the models will facilitate exploration of are:
• How do various local rules scale up to produce different emergent global patterns?
• How do the spatial scales of behaviors or interactions affect dynamics of these systems?
• What happens when two models of this type are coupled, e.g. a model of a population on a heterogeneous landscape, together with a model of how strategies for management of that population’s habitat spread through the human population?
• How successful would fixed management regulations be, versus adaptive strategies in response to dynamics of a population which is being managed?
Note that the aims of this initial project are primarily outreach activities. Although some of the models to be developed will in fact be novel applied mathematical systems (in particular the coupled models), producing journal publications in this first year is not a central goal, though it would certainly be a desirable additional outcome.
The simulation models will be implemented as Java web applets. This allows them to run in a standard web browser on the three most popular computing platforms today (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Though there are occasional glitches depending on the platform and specific browser being used, for the most part such Java applets work fairly well for a very large segment of computer users.
The new simulation applets will also be made publicly available; direct K-12 outreach visits will also be schedule as possible. One such session has already been held and another one is scheduled, using the already-existing applets from 2004. In June 2009, a session with 24 7th graders from Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, & Engineering in New
York City was held on the University of Maine campus in Orono. The students were very enthusiastic about playing with the models, adjusting parameters, and exploring to find the most “interesting” behaviors possible from the models. Many of them interacted with the models in ways not anticipated. Another such session, this time at the high-school level, is planned for February 5, 2010 on the University of Maine Presque Isle campus. High-school students and teachers are being invited from a number of schools to come to the UMPI campus for a morning-long interactive session working with the models.
Experience so far indicates that when spatially explicit models are implemented in such a way which allows for direct hands-on use by the students, they become very engaged in exploring the boundaries of what the models can do.
