Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability

Journal or Book Title: IBIS

Volume/Issue: 137

Page Number(s): S120-S126

Year Published: 1994

Models of Mobile Animal Populations (MAP models) simulate long-term land use changes, population trends and patterns of biological diversity on landscapes of lo3-lo5 ha. MAP models can incorporate information about past land-use patterns and management practices and can project future patterns based on management plans. We illustrate this approach with an examplc of how implementation of a US. Forest Service management plan at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, U.S.A., might influence population trends of Bachman's Sparrow Airnophila aestivalis, a relatively rare and declining species In southeastern pine forests. In this case, a managment plan, largely designed to improve condtions for an endangered specics, Red-cockaded Woodpecker Picoides borealis, may have a negative impact, at least in the short term, on another species of management conccrn, Bachman's Sparrow. In a parallel processing version of the MAP models, a single landscape that would ordinarily be too large or detailed to be simulated on a single computer is subdivided into a number of smaller landscapes, and each landscape is simulated in parallel, either on a single multi-tasking machine or on a group of networked machines. With this approach we are attempting to determine just how large a landscape must be before the dynamics of a population within it are more or less independent of factors beyond the landscape boundaries.

Type of Publication: Journal Article