We consider the question of how accurately we can hope to predict future biodiversity in a world in which many interacting species are at risk of extinction. Simple models assuming that species' extinctions occur independently are easily analysed, but do not account for the fact that many species depend on or otherwise interact with each other. In this paper we evaluate the effect of explicitly...

In this article, we give an example for the modelling of ecological systems with cellular automata based on the description of cell's behaviour by Petri nets. Petri nets ooer a formal modelling technique with event{based, concurrent, asynchronous state changes where graphical symbols are used for the description of states resp. state changes. This allows the formal description of cellular autom...

Support vector machine (SVM) was used to analyze the occurrence of roach in Flemish stream basins (Belgium). Several habitat and physico?chemical variables were used as inputs for the model development. The biotic variable merely consisted of abundance data which was used for predicting presence/absence of roach. Genetic algorithm (GA) was combined with SVM in order to select the most important...

In the present study, classification trees (CTs-J48 algorithm) were used to study the occurrence of roach in rivers in Flanders (Belgium). The presence/absence of roach was modelled based on a set of river characteristics. The predictive performance of the CTs models was assessed based on the percentage of Correctly Classified Instances (CCI) and Cohen's kappa statistics. To find the best model...

The Calculus of Wrapped Compartments is a framework based on stochastic multiset rewriting in a compartmentalised setting originally developed for the modelling and analysis of biological interactions. In this paper, we propose to use this calculus for the description of ecological systems and we provide the modelling guidelines to encode within the calculus some of the main interactions leadin...

The Calculus of Wrapped Compartments is a framework based on stochastic multiset rewriting in a compartmentalised setting originally developed for the modelling and analysis of biological interactions. In this paper, we propose to use this calculus for the description of ecological systems and we provide the modelling guidelines to encode within the calculus some of the main interactions leadin...

Competition between organisms influences the processes governing the colonisation of new habitats. As a consequence, species or populations arriving first at a suitable location may prevent secondary colonization. While adaptation to environmental variables (e.g., temperature, altitude, etc.) is essential, the presence or absence of certain species at a particular location often depends on whet...

Despite the fact that ontologies have gained great interest by the knowledge based systems community in the recent years, there is a dearth of applications based on formal ontologies. In the paper we shed light in an undiscovered corner in the use of formal ontologies: use of ontological constraints in combination with meta-interpretation in order to reveal potential conceptual errors in specii...

Ecological modellers may be deterred from using object-oriented programming languages by reports of the inherent rigidity of the object-oriented formulation, giving rise to a poor representation of biotic interaction. Internal approaches of imitating relationships between the components of an ecological model bury the associated code inside the object declarations of one or more of these compon...