Building Qualitative Models in Ecology

Building qualitative models is a difficult task . The construction of re-usable models, as well as the formalisation of the modelling process itself, are goals both to researchers in qualitative reasoning and ecology . This paper presents a library of model fragments for reasoning about the behaviour of ecological communities . «'e have developed a kernel of partial models that represents general knowledge about. populations, which can be (re-)used in different situations . In addition, this paper discusses guidelines for the construction of qualitative models, based on our experience in representing the ecology of fire in the Brazilian cerrado vegetation . Our aim is to explicate the decisions we took during the construction of our models and to reformulate them as (more) general guidelines for the construction of qualitative models . Understanding the modelling process is a first step towards realising modelling support .