With our parakeet field season cancelled, the crew evacuated, and plans for bringing animals into our lab for empirical research on hold, I’ve transitioned almost my entire group over to learning how to use computational models. These are great skills to have anyway, and things I wanted my group to learn at some point, so now seems like a good time for an introduction to modeling!
We’re planning to focus on agent-based modeling, likely using the R integration with NetLogo to get us started. Here’s our plan:
Meeting 1: Read and discuss “Not Just a Theory—The Utility of Mathematical Models in Evolutionary Biology“. Brainstorm ideas for potential modeling questions for next time.
Meeting 2: Discuss/tweak initial ideas. What makes an idea good for a modeling approach? How do questions need to be tweaked or simplified to work as a modeling question? Read and discuss “Ten Simple Rules for Effective Computational Research“. Download NetLogo for next time.
Meeting 3: We discussed a few of the beginner tutorials in NetLogo and how we might be able to adapt a similar framework for our own questions. We started with the Party Model and then moved to the Wolf/Sheep Predation model. For next time, we’ll brainstorm simple starting places to use to build our own model.
