Picked a pretty paper
November 18, 2009by Michael Dale (mrd09)
After our presentation today, we have decided to replicate the results of the first paper in the list of five from the last post. In other words, we’re going to try to model deermice. The paper came to the conclusion that the width of the corridors are secondary in importance to the vegetation coverage of corridors and conservation areas. To put it simply, deermice are hawk bait, so they like to have thick vegetation to avoid predation. If there’s no coverage, the mice won’t use a corridor regardless of width. When you put good coverage in, the width starts to matter.
We will now add more complexity to our model so we can simulate both vegetation and predation. We may or may not need to add preferential movement to the creatures’ behavior, eg. avoiding high predation areas. The best option will probably be to simply play with predation probabilities to simulate cover. If we can replicate the paper’s results, great. If we can do one better, awesome.