A Cellular Automata Model of Spatio-Temporal Distribution of Species

• Autor(a) principal: Bioco, João
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Silva, João, Canovas, Fernando, Fazendeiro, Paulo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/8232
• topic: Environmental modeling; Cellular automata; Modeling tools; Species distribution models

Cellular automata (CA) are discrete models frequently used in ecological and epidemiological studies due to the capacity to simulate dynamics systems and analyze their behavior. One of the applications of CA in ecology is in the analysis of the spatial distribution of species, where models are created and simulated in order to study the response of ecological systems to different kinds of exogenous or endogenous perturbations. In this study we describe an implementation of a cellular automaton model able to incorporate environmental data collected from different heterogeneous sources. To the user is given the power to produce and analyze different scenarios by combining the available variables at will. Different hypothesis regarding the individual contribution of each environmental variable can be promptly tested. As an illustrative example of the flexibility of our implementation we present a case study where, departing from a general additive model (GAM), validated in the literature, a possible explanation is given for the spatio-temporal distribution of two haplotypes of honeybees along Iberian Peninsula. Environmental data were used to describe every 30x30 second unit grid of the study area (World Geodetic System 1984 WGS84, geographical coordinates). The results of our model are compared and discussed at the light of the real data collected on the terrain. Curiously enough, both in the synthesized model and in the real data, one can observe that the frequency of African haplotypes decreases in a SW-NE trend, while that of west European lineage increases.