Postdoctoral Researcher Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona
The spatial aspects of habitat topography, hydraulic connectivity, prey and resource distribution, refuge availability, competitor and predator avoidance, and overall dispersal all contribute to an understanding of an organism’s true presence and function in an ecosystem. However, lab microcosms and modeling efforts often fall short of describing ecosystems in the wild. Coming from the field of science visualization and outreach, we propose that the robust industry and skilled workforce behind modern interactive 3D game design and programming can be harnessed to create detailed ecosystem simulators to help fill this gap between theory and fieldwork. By embodying the anatomy and rule-based behaviors of individual agents within realistic virtual environments, researchers can view such simulations with more nuance than ever via the intuitive immediacy of a visual, naturalistic ecosystem portrait while also retaining a quantitative, data-driven underpinning for the simulation design. Here, we present this concept via a series of virtual dioramas that show the potential to model arthropod ecology on a digital stage.