Lions take down a Cape buffaloCaelioFor most of its history, ecology has been dominated by small-scale field work and studies of specific ecosystems. Now, some ecologists are calling upon their peers to think bigger, and to bring the field into the era of Big Science. And it does not come much bigger than computational ecologist Drew Purves’s suggestion of modeling all life on Earth.
Purves, a researcher at Microsoft’s computer science research center in Cambridge, United Kingdom, is building a prototype that simulates entire ecosystems across the planet. Known as the Madingley model, Purves’s simulation captures the life, growth, migration, interactions, and death of individual creatures, and the flow of energy and nutrients between them.
Rather than modeling specific species, the Madingley model places them into broad bins, like carnivore or herbivore, diurnal or nocturnal, birds or mammals. And rather than simulating every individual—an impossibly large task for modern computing—the model uses “cohorts” to represent similar clusters of individuals, such as fish shoals.
Purves hopes that this and other “general ecosystem models” (GEMs) will provide a better understanding of how different ecosystems fit together, and how their properties “bubble ...
