- Brainstorm an ecological question you think can be explored with a mathematical model
- Develop a conceptual model (box and arrows). Identify the state variables your model will track, and what processes cause these to change through time
- Specify your mechanism: what is the driving process your are interested in? How does it affect flow rates that increase or decrease your state variable?
Before class on November 19th, you should brainstorm the above ideas individually and come prepared to discuss with others.
You will then get in groups to decide on one wooly question you would like to explore with a conceptual model. This includes specifying functional forms for your mechanisms, simplifying model if appropriate, and performing simple math or use graphing to gain insight about model behavior. You will be working on this conceptual model for the last two weeks of the module both in and out of class.
Groups will present their conceptual models and the insights they learned from them in class on December 3rd. These presentations will be ten minutes long, with ten minutes for discussion and questions for each group. Think of these presentations like presenting an idea at a lab meeting, they are relatively informal and low stakes and the goal is to get feedback on ideas, and even come up with new ones! Your presentations should cover the following:
- The main wooly question you set out to answer
- A box and arrow diagram of the system
- The mathematical equations that describe the system, with a clear explanation of how it relates to the box and arrow diagram
- A proposed way to explore the relationship between drivers and and state variables. This could be something like the proposed axis labels of graphs or intuiting what these relationships may look like.
- The next steps of this work. Is it to sketch out the relationships between drivers and state variables? Is it to add additional complexity? This will likely be the base of discussion following the presentation.
These presentations will be like those we did for the R0 papers, involving sketching out ideas on the board. You can write equations onto large sticky paper beforehand (sheets are in the conference room) or on a powerpoint (but please no more than 1 -2 slides).