Here are some ideas for altering parameters to mimic beach bark disease and emerald ash borer:

~ I have recently read in a long term study on hardwood forest regeneration that when mature american beech trees are about to succumb to beech bark disease they will send up alot of root shoots. To account for this, the life span of beech will have to be shortened (by half or so), but they will also somehow have to be made more prolific. It would also be good to know if beech "behaves" this way anytime it is about to die, not only when it has beech bark disease.

~ Emerald ash borer can be simulated by changing the death equation, or by greatly increasing the chances of an ash tree dieing. The literature states that emerald ash borer can cause mortal damage to an ash tree within 3 - 4 years of the tree encountering the insect.

I will post more possibilities later,

~ Erin Pfeil

Within the past two weeks I created a poster that was presented at YSU's Biology Days. It turned out a well and won one of the second tier prizes for the event. It will probably also be presented this week for an event showcasing the STEM college at YSU. As far as the research, I have been compiling journal articles so that we may accurately and realistically alter parameters to reflect conditions such as emerald ash borer and hemlock wooly adelgid. Right now I am focusing on those two pathogens. Tommorow I will post my thoughts and ideas on how we might use glass box and netlogo to accomplish this.

~Erin K. Pfeil

Over the past several weeks a lot has been accomplished on our forest modeling project. We are still working on getting the Black Box version of SimForest to function, but Glass box is working perfectly. I have constructed a species table that is representative of Zoar Valley and some of its local conditions (such as the water table depth). Parameters such as average rainfall per month and temperature are still being decided upon. To test future conditions and affects on forest composition, rainfall and temperature will be adjusted several times, so this is taking additional research and consideration. My literature searches are ongoing to find information about our parameters and environmental variables we need to change and adjust to raise the predictive power of our models.
We have presented our research so far at QUEST, which is a conference put on by YSU for student research. I was responsible for the research site introduction and for an explanation of how we were going to use existing and published data sources to model forest composition. Next week on the 17th, I will be presenting a poster of our research at YSU’s Biology Days departmental conference.

~ Erin K. Pfeil