Stochastic Hybrid Models of Community Dynamics

Nov 4-6, 2024

Dr. Carlos Melian, University of Bern

Dr. Leonardo Aguirre, EAWAG

The workshop is supposed to foster collaboration between theoretical and practical ecologists interested in community dynamics of interacting populations in variable environments. Participants will learn how individual-based conceptual models can be translated into stochastic hybrid models and how to forward-simulate them in-silico. Further, it will be discussed how these models can be systematically simplified in order to make them amenable to either theoretical or practical ecology workflows. By this token, participants will gain a deeper understanding of what theoretical ecology and practical data modelling have to offer each other. Everyone is encouraged to bring their own conceptual models of potentially interesting community interaction dynamics – perhaps a long dormant side project that you'd like to revive?

Preliminary schedule:

Day 1 (model setup):- Morning session: We will collect an array of conceptual community models that will serve as
examples throughout the course. It will be explained how to abstractly represent them as stochastic
interaction networks and how to input them in a simulation software using a graphical user interface.
- Afternoon session: Participants will form small groups. Each group will work on one example model
from the morning session, represent it as stochastic interaction network and forward-simulate the
model. Some further time-consuming simulation outputs will be generated over night using the
scientific computing resources accessible to EAWAG.

Day 2 (theoretical ecology):- Morning session: We will start by inspecting the simulation outputs of Day 1 in order to gain intuition
about the kind of stochastic processes generated by stochastic interaction network models. I will then
present some of the underlying mathematical theory, which will allow to make contact with classical
formalisms of theoretical ecology through systematic model simplifications.
- Afternoon session: We are going to discuss some of the typical questions asked in theoretical ecology
and attempt to relate our example models to hypothesized general mechanism from the literature.

Day 3 (practical ecology):
- Morning session: I will show how to use Bayesian filtering in order to evaluate potential experimental
designs. In particular we will discuss state- and parameter-estimation.
- Afternoon session: The participants will discuss potential experimental designs for their in-silico
example models and evaluate them with respect to state- and parameter-estimability.

EAWAG Kastanienbaum

Map

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