Wednesday, August 8, 2007

PS 47-110: Modeling herbivory in forest canopies

Leon Kaganovskiy and Margaret Lowman. New College of Florida

In this project we use tree data structures to model the growth
and dynamics of tree leaves attacked by insects using the cellular
automata ideas similar to fire and infectious decease spreading
models.  We developed a stochastic model of a generic tree where,
at each step, probabilistic distributions are used to predict if a
particular tree branch is going to break into sub-branches or end
with leaves. Once such a tree structure is created, a volume
containing leaves is determined and broken into a large number of
computational cells. Then the dynamics of the leaves behavior
including bug eating, aging, light and weather conditions is first
evaluated on the computational cells and then is mapped back onto
the tree leaves.  The computational results show trends similar to
extensive field measurements done by Lowman in different forest canopies.