A collaborative class project with each participant creating an animal/plant sub-model​ to explore the greater population/community dynamics of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

This model illustrates predator prey interactions using real-life data of wolf and moose populations on the Isle Royale.

We incorporate logistic growth into the moose dynamics, and we replace the death flow of the moose with a kill rate modeled from the kill rate data found on the Isle Royale website.

I start with these parameters:
Wolf Death Rate = 0.15
Wolf Birth Rate = 0.0187963
Moose Birth Rate = 0.4
Carrying Capacity = 2000
Initial Moose: 563
Initial Wolves: 20

I used RK-4 with step-size 0.1, from 1959 for 60 years.

The moose birth flow is logistic, MBR*M*(1-M/K)
Moose death flow is Kill Rate (in Moose/Year)
Wolf birth flow is WBR*Kill Rate (in Wolves/Year)
Wolf death flow is WDR*W

The body of research and studies generated on the Fryingpan River between the 1940s and the present supports the development of a conceptual model of ecosystem responses to hydrological regime behavior and streamflow management activities. This conceptual model should encourage conversations about system behavior and collective understanding among stakeholders regarding connections between specific hydrological regime characteristics affected by management of Ruedi Reservoir and the ecological or biological variables important to local communities. For the sake of simplicity, the model includes mostly unidirectional relationships—feedback loops are exploded to reveal intermediate connections between variables. This approach increases the number of variables represented in the system, perhaps increasing its complexity at first glance. However, the primary benefit to the end user is that the model becomes more readable and explicit in its representation of system behavior. 

 

The conceptual model presented here likely differs by degrees from those held by the various investigators who considered Fryingpan River processes over the previous 80 years. However, it affectively aggregates the ideas main presented by each of those individuals. This model focuses on hydrological and biological variables and does not incorporate the entire diversity of human uses and needs for water from the Fryingpan River (e.g. hydropower production for the City of Aspen, revenue generated in the Town of Basalt by angling activities, etc.).  Rather it attempts to illustrate how the conditional state of important ecosystem characteristics might respond to reservoir management activities that impact typical spring flows, peak flow timing and magnitude, summer flows, fall flows, and winter flows. 

A collaborative class project with each participant creating an animal/plant sub-model​ to explore the greater population/community dynamics of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

The model simulates how logging in with tourism(mountain biking) in Derby Tasmania.

A collaborative class project with each participant creating an animal/plant sub-model​ to explore the greater population/community dynamics of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

The purpose of this deer management model is to explore the capacity of wildlife management actions to help us adapt to the effects of climate change.

Modeling forest succession in a northeast deciduous forest.

Simple conceptual site model of AFFF PFAS site contamination fluxes.

​Climate Sector Boundary Diagram By Guy Lakeman

A model which simulates the competition between logging versus adventure tourism (mountain bike ridding) in Derby Tasmania.  Simulation borrowed from the Easter Island simulation.

Challenges in sustainability are multilevel.
This diagram attempts to summarize levels of self reinforcing destructive dynamics, authors that deal with them, and point of leverage for change.

The base of the crisis is a mechanistic rather than ecological worldview. This mechanistic worldview is based on outdated science that assumed the universe to be a large machine. In a machine there is an inside and an outside. The health of the inside is important for the machine, the outside not. In an ecological view everything is interconnected, there is no clear separation in the future of self and other. All parts influence the health of other parts. To retain health sensitivity and democracy are inherent. The sense of separation from other that keeps the mechanistic worldview dominant is duality. Being cut off from spiritual traditions due to a mechanistic view of science people need access to inter-spirituality to reconnect with the human traditions and tools around connectedness, inner discovery, and compassion. Many books on modern physics and biology deal with the system view implications. "The coming interspiritual age" deals with the need to connect spiritual traditions and science.

At the bottom for the dynamic is an individual a sense of disconnectedness leads to a dependency on spending and having rather than connecting. The connecting has become too painful and dealing with it unpopular in our culture. Joanna Macy deals with this in Active Hope. 

This affluenza and disconnection is worsened by a market that floods one with advertisements aimed at creating needs and a sense of dissatisfaction with that one has.

National economies are structured around maximising GDP which means maximising consumption and financial capital movement. This is at the cost of local economies. These same local economies are needed for balanced happiness as well as for sustainability.

Generally institutions focus on maximising consumption rather than sustaining life support systems. David Korten covers this well.

Power and wealth is confused in this worldview. In striving for wealth only power is striven for in the form of money and monopoly.

Those at the head of large banks and corporations tend to be there because they exemplify this approach. They have few scruples about enforcing this approach onto everyone through wars and disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein and David Estulin documented this.

Power has become so centralized that we need this understanding to be widespread and include many of those in power. Progress of all of these levels are needed to show them and all that another way is possible.

This is a basic BIDE (birth, immigration, death, emigration) model.  Not all parts are implemented, however Birth and Death are.

This is a basic model for use with our lab section.  The full BIDE options.

This non-dimensionalized, sleekest most neatest model illustrates predator prey interactions using logistic growth for the moose population, for the wolf and moose populations on Isle Royale.

Thanks Scott Fortmann-Roe for the original model.

I've added in an adjustment to handle population sizes, by dividing by moose carrying capacity.

Time is scaled by the moose birth parameter:
tau=bm*t

There are therefore only three parameters left to account for any dynamics:

beta = bw/bm (relative wolf to moose births)
delta = dm/bm (relative death to birth ratio for moose)
gamma = dw/bm (wolf deaths to moose births)

The equations are thus

dM/dtau = M [ (1-M) - delta W ]
dW/dtau = W [beta M - gamma ]

There is a stable equilibrium pair of population values, relative to the carrying capacity:

M^* = gamma / beta
W^* = (1-gamma / beta) / delta

I have a sleek version with a logistical growth term for the moose, at

http://www.nku.edu/~longa/classes/2018spring/mat375/mathematica/Moose-n-Wolf-InsightMaker-sleek.nb

B

A flow based recreation of the base model presented in Munz et al 2009 using zombies to teach basic SIR epidemiology models