Models as an experiment: an example with phyto-zooplankton

LEONARDO SARAVIA

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Microbial communities: structure and interactions with other pelagic and benthic components of the coastal western Antarctic environments; 2015

Instituto Antártico Argentino

Mathematical and simulation models can be used to mimic complex ecological systems, that can be easily manipulated in ways that would be impossible, too costly or unethical to do in natural systems. This is an additional insight beyond theory development and testing, models can offer hypotheses about the way the world works and can give guidance as to which data are most important to gather experimentally.