The goal, broadly speaking
I have a general goal in mind, as wander the path of self education through the the beautiful forests of biology and ecology. This goal may well change, but for now…
Broadly speaking, I want to leverage my experience and knowledge in design, software, cognitive science and philosophy to help develop ecological science. For now the best way I can identify to do this is in the world of conceptual models — specifically conceptual models within ecosystem ecology. If you are unfamiliar with what conceptual models are, you can think of them as ‘boxes and arrows’ diagrams; flow chart type representations of the entities and dynamics in, for example, an ecosystem.
These can be contrasted with mathematical models, which attempt to quantitatively model and represent the entities and dynamics in some system. Both are crucial aspects of modelling, so why am I focusing on conceptual models? I’m not good enough at maths! That’s one reason, but there’s another one that makes me feel more confident about myself:
There’s a lot of room for improvement in the world of ecosystem ecology conceptual modelling, and I believe massive benefit to be had for certain improvements. Mostly the potential benefit boils down to helping people understand ecosystems better, more fully, more intuitively, and in more detail. This goes for professional and academic ecologists, as well as lay people.
In the same way that Einstein said that playing with lego-like building blocks as a child helped give him some kind of deep intellectual framework, on which he later could build the more complex, advanced and abstract thinking technologies he used to revolutionise physics, I believe that brilliant conceptual visualisations of ecosystems will enable people to supercharge their knowledge and intelligence to fuel understanding, insights and theoretical developments that might have otherwise remained hidden.
I want to build an easy to use, open source platform, that runs on the web, and can be used by anyone to create interactive and dynamic ecosystem models, that reveal the entities and dynamics in the system in interesting and illuminating ways. I want, in particular, to try and illustrate some different levels of organisation in the visualisations, as well as (perhaps) focusing on the flow of energy through an ecosystem as the foundation of the models.
I will at some point start to develop a rudimentary proof of concept for this modelling framework, which I will also document to some extent here, and provide the source code for on Github.
