MIEA 2012-2013

Ecological Modelling

Room 115 Ed. Dept (11-13h Mondays)

Room 3.1 Ed. Dept (14-17h Fridays)

This site contains essential information for the Ecological Modelling course lectured by Prof.João Gomes Ferreira and Dr. Camille Saurel

Enrollment

Resources

Powersim for educational purposes (please contact JGF). The software works only on 32 bit operating systems.

Schedule

Modules marked in blue are assessment sessions and correspond to student presentations. These presentations should consist of a few Powerpoint slides and/or Powersim models

Room 2.1 - Building DCEA

One member of the group must have a laptop with PowerSim installed at class sessions.

Deadline for project:

Final work: To be handed in by Thursday January 3rd 2013, 17.00h.

Room 446 Ed. Ambiente or secretarial office (D. Filomena Gomes)

Course assessment

The course will be assessed through coursework exercises, course participation, and by an ecological modelling project, done in a group of two. A model will be developed in Powersim, and a document written up detailing the work done.

Potential topics (others may be proposed by the student groups)

1. Eutrophication in a Portuguese reservoir

2. Production of gilthead bream (Sparus aurata, dourada) in pond culture in the Algarve.

Presentation for course session 5: Topic and system selection, bearing in mind (i) group interests; (ii) management relevance; (iii) complexity and tractability of issue, including data requirements and availability.

Presentation for course session 7: Case study reviews, data sources. Presentation of updated Session 5 slides, together with more detailed case study analysis and a review of data sources, and if possible, examples of the data itself. Further discussion. Other activities: development of forcing function components for models..

The structure of the ecological modelling project document (i.e. the report to be handed in as a final course deliverable) is as follows:

1. Maximum length: Ten A4 pages (no annexes), font 11 Arial, spacing: 1.5;

2. General structure (can be adapted): Problem definition, state of the art, methodology (model concept, implementation), results and discusssion (should include some basic sensitivity analysis), references;

3. The references must include at least eight recent SCI papers (2004-2012), relevant to the topic, and no more than eight web references. All references must be cited in the text. Only a maximum of two SCI papers and two web references can be from work by course staff.

The course mark will be calculated based on: 30% written work (includes the model itself), 25% on each of two formal course assessment sessions and 20% on participation assessment.

Assessment 1: Develop a model with two state variables and connections between them (e.g. a fish and its prey) and illustrate the mass flux from prey to predator over a 365 day cycle. To be developed individually and presented on 2012.10.01

Assessment 2 : Topic and system selection, bearing in mind (i) group interests; (ii) management relevance; (iii) complexity and tractability of issue, including data requirements and availability. To be developed by the groups and presented on 2012.10.08

Assessment 3 : Case study reviews, data sources. Presentation of updated Session 5 slides, together with more detailed case study analysis and a review of data sources, and if possible, examples of the data itself. Further discussion. To be developed by the groups and presented on 2012.10.15

FORMAL ASSESSMENTS : see course lecture schedule. These assessments relate to the ecological modelling project, and are project milestones.