Crowdsourcing ecological research: Using the Trails Forward simulation platform and video game to address conservation issues

Background/Question/Methods

Trails Forward is a project in which we are developing a simulation environment that incorporates ecology, economics, and policy decisions to create a realistic and dynamic system which can be used to investigate a wide range of research questions. Central to this approach is the implementation of agent- or individual-based models, which use behavioral characteristics to define a decision ruleset that determines the behavior of agents. These agents can represent a variety of organisms ranging from plants to people. This platform also doubles as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, intended to increase awareness regarding the environmental, economic, and institutional factors around land-use conflicts. The interaction of the two objectives converge as the organismal models respond to land use decisions made by players to reach certain realistic objectives determined through the gameplay. One of the greatest benefits is that this environment allows us to examine complex relationships and dynamics that are either impracticable or impossible to experimentally manipulate in the real world. This allows for a nearly endless variety of research questions to be addressed, from exploring habitat utilization of species in developing housing markets, to examining home buyer behavior in response to variable market constraints. 

Results/Conclusions

I will present a current version of the Trials Forward system that has been developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration of ecologists, computer scientists, and educational researchers. Various features of the system will be showcased, with a focus on the potential to use this system in ecological research. In particular, I will discuss how incorporating research from various disciplines provides a more holistic framework, and allows contributed models to not only address a specific question, but also to identify how various components of the system interact to produce unintended consequences. As an example I will introduce a model of the American marten (Martes americana), and how the system allows us to interface a detailed individual-based demographic model with land use change to investigate which factors are having the greatest impact on the reintroduction of marten into Northern Wisconsin.