Computational Models of White-Tailed Deer in the Florida Everglades

Abstract

Computermodels can be used to simulate the interactions between animals and their environments. The SIMPDEL (Spatially-Explicit Individual-Based Simulation Model of Florida Panther and White-Tailed Deer in the Everglades and Big Cypress Landscapes) model has been developed to analyze and predict the effects of alternative water managementscenarios in South Florida on the long-term populations of white-tailed deer and Florida panther. This model simulates the aging, reproduction, foraging, growth, and mortality of individual animals over a period of 23 years. The primary focus of this work is the use of parallel processing in the three main computational components of SIMPDEL: hydrology, vegetation, and deer foraging. Very similar results for both sequential and parallel SIMPDEL models have been obtained and speed improvements ranging from 8.9 to 27.0 were achieved for the parallel model over the sequential model executing on a Sun SPARCstation 5.