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Research Challenges in Modelling Ecosystems

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8938))

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Abstract

Ecosystems and their biodiversity have to be protected and preserved as sources of services and goods. The human population controls and modifies ecosystems to improve its health conditions and welfare. The consequences of human activities should be carefully monitored and ecosystems should be managed to protect all of the species and preserve their functioning. The development of strategies for ecosystem management benefits from the use of computational techniques to model the dynamics of species that interact with their abiotic and biotic environment. Life scientists and computer scientists need to work together to define and analyse ecosystem models. However, there is a multifaceted gap between the approaches used in life science and those used in computer science. Such gap is both cultural and technical, and results in a number of challenges. In this paper we identify these challenges and provide technical and cultural proposals for solving them.

We would like to thank Paolo Milazzo for inspiring discussions and for suggesting Dynamic I/O Automata as a possibly appropriate modelling formalism. Discussions with Matteo Pedercini contributed to clarify strengths and weaknesses of System Dynamics (SD). Finally, we also would like to thank the anonymous referees who provided alternative but equally valuable opinions reported in Sect. 5.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Antonio Cerone

  2. GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung, Kiel, Germany

    Marco Scotti

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  1. Antonio Cerone
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain

    Carlos Canal

  2. LIG Lab, Saint Martin d'Hères Cedex, France

    Akram Idani

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Cerone, A., Scotti, M. (2015). Research Challenges in Modelling Ecosystems. In: Canal, C., Idani, A. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8938. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15201-1_18

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