Adding several ecological theories to the decision making of a wildlife Agent-Based Model to determine effects of climate change
(Book - Regular Print)

ProQuest Document ID : 1024589415

Advisor : Melanie Wetzel

Thesis (M.A.) -- Prescott College, 2012

The learning objectives of this thesis have been to participate in a real world collaborative research project exploring possible affects of climate change on wildlife species, understanding the process of designing models which capture the decision making of wildlife, and learning how to code models. The project I became part of has attempted to determine the causality of wildlife decision making in the context of climate change. A way to achieve this is to understand how heat is incorporated into a species decision making considering heat. Three integrated models were created 1. The optimum foraging activity budget model, 2. The spatially explicit optimum foraging model, and 3. The Agent-Based model. The optimum foraging activity budget model examines an animal's decision making in terms of heat and foraging. The spatially explicit optimum foraging model then explores how the animal's decisions affect its survival in a spatially explicit context. Finally, the agent model incorporates what was learned in the previous models to add heat as a criteria in a multi-criteria decision making framework.