CS 3891 - Group 7 Project Proposal Hadley Shapland, Hannah Yang, Max Guillet
We are working on a project with Dr. Jen Bradham and Dr. Kristy Ferraro to explore how patch fragmentation affects peccaries’ ability to meet their nutritional demand. We will create a model that attempts to evaluate the spatial fragmentation threshold for large mammal presence. We will use actual moment data using GPS collars to quantify step length and turning angle to determine animal movement and caloric data of intake and availability to determine habitat thresholds. Due to the need to use collected GPS data and literature-based metabolic data, we use the white-lipped peccary as a case study. Our model will attempt to answer the following question: What is the habitat fragmentation size threshold that can support movement patterns and calorically support peccary herds?
This project will require us to understand existing code in NetLogo and R, and write our own NetLogo model for the peccary data. It will also require us to do background research on the nutritional demands of peccaries and the nutritional availability for the landscape they are in to improve our model.
The world is currently experiencing the 6th mass extinction, where conservative estimates put extinction rates today at 100 times the background rate. One significant cause is habitat loss/fragmentation due to human development. Our project aims to help provide more information on how much habitat fragmentation white-lipped peccaries (and potentially other large mammals) can withstand and still support healthy populations. This information is important to the conservation of peccaries and their ecosystems, and could help inform policy on the protection of rainforests in South America.
In order for our models output to be of value, we need to validate that our model is a reasonably accurate representation of the real world. We will validate our model using various industry standard techniques, including animation, or graphical display of the model over time, graphical representation, tracing, and historical data validation. We will validate and calibrate accordingly.
Biodiversity is incredibly important to the earth’s health and the human population. Human activities have caused incredible declines in biodiversity, and I think it is important for us to undo this and conserve biodiversity. To do this it is important to understand how threats like habitat fragmentation affect species, such as the white-lipped peccary, and their ecosystems.