Applications
Simile is used in a wide range of applications in the earth, environmental and life sciences, but in this page we would like to highlight some particularly interesting areas to help explain what makes Simile especially well suited to these research projects.
Agriculture
Agriculture
Much of our activity can be categorised under the broad heading of agricultural modelling, including:
- crop growth models
- pest and disease models
- modelling forest dynamics, with an emphasis on individual-level and stand-level dynamics.
- Spatially-explicit competition indices and the analysis of mixed-species plantings with the Simile modelling environment, Jerome K. Vanclay, ePublications@SCU
- rural systems, with an emphasis on village-scale modelling including both the biophysical and soio-ecolomic components.
- Nitrous oxide emissions from arable farmland
Forestry
- Improving the Triple Line Bottom Line Returns from Small-scale ForestryVanclay, J., 2007. Insights from a Systems View: How Modelling can Inform Reform. In S. Harrison, A. Bosch and J. Herbohn (eds) Improving the Triple Line Bottom Line Returns from Small-scale Forestry, Ormoc, Philippines, pp.367-374. PDF/text Abstract
- Spatially-explicit competition indices and the analysis of mixed-species plantings with the Simile modelling environment. Vanclay, J.K., 2006. Forest Ecology and Management, 233:295-302. Preprint/PDF Abstract/HTML Source
Water Management/Hydrology
AquaStress
The Centre for Water Systems (CWS) at the University of Exeter has been using Simile within the international researchproject, AquaStress. AquaStress is a European Community Framework 6 Integrated Project on the Mitigation of Water Stress through new Approaches to Integrating Management, Technical, Economic and Institutional Instruments.
One of the most important requirements for this project has been the "bottom-up" participatory approach to case studies, at all stages, starting from the definition of the case studies. This is the main reason we chose System Dynamics Modelling (SDM), as a tool for system modelling. Out of the different software packages available, we selected Simile for quantitative (numerical) modelling, mainly for two reasons: (a) the ability to host submodels and (b) the easy input/output process through EXCEL files.>