Monday, August 3, 2009: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM
Mesilla, Albuquerque Convention Center
OOS 2 - Developing Ecological Knowledge for Sustainability Science: Representing Adaptive Behavior in Ecological Management Models
Individual-based models are essential for sustainability science because they can represent how populations and communities are affected by complex and nonlinear environmental influences, feedbacks, and interactions. But for IBMs to be useful, they must adequately represent individual adaptive behavior: How do organisms make key decisions considering the current state of their environment and themselves? Classical behavior theory often is inadequate in realistic models where individuals must make tradeoffs among factors such as growth, risk, and reproductive output while environmental conditions are variable and affected by behavior of other individuals. In this session, speakers will present a variety of methods used to represent adaptive behavior in models of real ecological systems that contain enough complexity to be useful for management ecology. Speakers will describe the system they modeled and the adaptive decisions individuals make, their approach to modeling decision-making, and the extent to which the model succeeded in producing realistic dynamics at the individual and system levels. Approaches will include empirical models that reproduce observed behavior patterns, artificial evolution of neural nets and related decision rules, and “fitness-seeking” in which individuals use prediction and approximation to estimate which alternative offers highest future fitness. This session will be of value to ecologists interested in models that consider the effects of adaptive behavior on population and community ecology. It will be of special value to those interested in models of real sustainability and management issues in specific ecological systems, because many such problems can be addressed only with IBMs that consider behavior.
Organizer:Steven F. Railsback, Humboldt State University
Co-organizer:Uta Berger, Technical University Dresden
Moderator:Uta Berger, Technical University Dresden
1:30 PMFrom adaptive behavior to communities and ecosystems in a changing world: Challenges for individual-based modeling in the next years
Volker Grimm, Helmholtz Centre for Ecological Research - UFZ
1:50 PMAdaptive equations for fear and attraction
Jarl Giske, University of Bergen
2:10 PMUsing fitness-maximizing individual-based models to advise the conservation of shorebird populations
Richard Stillman, Bournemouth University
2:30 PMELAM integration of movement data, cognitive ecology, and hydraulic and water quality pattern shows how fish may navigate perceived gradients in multiple stimuli
R. Andrew Goodwin, U.S. Army Engineer R&D Center, John M. Nestler, U.S. Army Engineer R&D Center, James J. Anderson, University of Washington, David L. Smith, U.S. Army Engineer R&D Center, Larry J. Weber, University of Iowa
2:50 PMPredator and prey spatial games in varying patches
Barney Luttbeg, Oklahoma State University
3:10 PMBreak
3:20 PMWill I eat or get eaten? Prediction and approximation in modeling realistically complex decisions
Steven F. Railsback, Humboldt State University
3:40 PMAdaptive individual behavior as a common denominator of emergent collective patterns in vertebrates
Roger Jovani, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Volker Grimm, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Ecological Research - UFZ
4:00 PMUsing dynamic state variable models to predict steelhead life history in four California watersheds
William H. Satterthwaite, University of California Santa Cruz
4:20 PMUsing consumer-resource models to deduce the shape of density dependence
Peter A. Abrams, University of Toronto
4:40 PMPredicting the fate of stocked fish: Modelling individual dispersal, and mortality to optimise the management of vulnerable species
Julien Cucherousset, Bournemouth University, Richard Stillman, Bournemouth University, Jean-Marc Roussel, INRA Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Jean-Marc Paillisson, Universite de Rennes 1, J Robert Britton, Bournemouth University, Rodolphe E Gozlan, Bournemouth University

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See more of The 94th ESA Annual Meeting (August 2 -- 7, 2009)