Class Material for the Mestrado
This site contains instructional material for the Module on Evaluating Ecological Models taught by William Silvert as part of the Water & Coastal Management MSc Programme at the University of the Algarve in Faro, Portugal, during the week 13-17 March of 2006. Material will be added to this site as appropriate.
Here
is the class of 2005, being sheparded into postition by the class
disciplinarian! (Click on the image to see a larger version.) This proves that it
is possible to survive this module.
In addition to the material on this site, you can find more general material on ecological modelling at http://ciencia.silvert.org/models, and Bill Silvert's papers and related material are at http://bill.silvert.org and in particular at http://bill.silvert.org/pdf.
Here are some handouts for the course. This page will be updated during the week of lectures with additional exercises and resource material. However the answers to the exercises will not be posted until the assignments have been turned in! The easiest way to access this material is to right-click the link and "save as".
Classroom Presentations
- The standard course information, in the required format. The PowerPoint version is very large, over 540 KB, so a smaller PDF version is available
- My own introduction to the module
- An entertaining test of how you think about problems
- Overview of modelling
- Food web models
- Indirect effects
- Aggregation in models
- Testing and validation
- Sensitivity analysis
Extra Material
- A NetLogo model of a fishing fleet, showing how an IBM (Individually Based Model) works. For this you need to download NetLogo. You can also run the model in your browser from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/community/Fishery or go straight to http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/community/run.cgi?Fishery.698.561.0 (this requires the latest version of Java).
- Discrete time models and the Leslie Matrix model
Assignments
- Description of the final project
- The first exercise, on Turbidity - Discussion of the Turbidity exercise
- Exercise on depletion of menhaden by high salinity - Discussion of the exercise
- Exercise on statistical relationship between fish eggs and larvae - Discussion of the model
- Exercise on oil slicks - Discussion of oil slicks
- Exercise on Lotka-Volterra model - Discussion of the model and exercise
- Summary of grade distributions