Research: mobile | metamodeling

Since my undergraduate days I've been involved in modeling research for conservation biologists. I'm still somewhat involved (in what little "free time" I have) and am doing my best to find points of integration between this work and my primary interests in mobile. The current plan involves using some of the models to examine individual movement and information dissemination of mobile phone users in some of the systems described in my mobile research section.

I'll try and get more info up for this section soon, but for now, here are super-brief descriptions of some of the projects I'm involved in:

Metamodel Approach to Wildlife Conservation Research

There are countless elements that go into creating an accurate model of even the simplest wildlife system--demographics, movement, disease, disasters, human intervention, etc. Most models simply choose to ignore or crudely approximate all but the one element that is currently being examined. A few models have attempted to incorporate as many of the factors as possible into one all-encompassing model (a megamodel). These approaches typically either ignore important characteristics or become too unweildy for most researchers to use.

The metamodeling approach, however, proposes that instead many smaller models be employed, each developed and run by the appropriate domain experts to carry out a very specific task such as modeling disease or deforestation. Not only is it likely that the outcomes of these models will better approximate the true outcome, but doing so will require extensive collaboration between researchers in many fields as well as stake-holders and local experts familiar with the system being modeled. The value of this collaboration cannot be over-looked in conservation research as typically all parties have to be completely on board with any recommended course of action for their to be any traction.

See our paper in Ecology and Society for much, much more. Funding for this work has come from many sources, including NSF, the Conservation Specialist Breeding Group (CBSG), the Chicago Zoological Society and various private donors.

Spatial Modeling and Analysis of Wildlife Populations

Spatial, an agent-based, spatially explicit model, allows researchers to develop complex movement and dispersal simulations based on existing movement data (e.g. radio collar tracking data) or on easy to create rules. Landscape data can be imported from GIS for more robust models. Funding for Spatial was provided in part by CBSG.

Generalized Epidemiological Modeling of Wildlife Populations

Outbreak is a generalized, agent-based epidemiological model designed to allow researchers to approximate the effects of numerous classes of disease on a population. Outbreak models are developed through simple parameterization and requires no modeling or programming abilities to use. Funding for the development of Outbreak was provided by CBSG.