Section: Software and Platforms

Ecomata

EcoMata is a tool-box for qualitative modeling and exploring ecosystems and for aiding to design environmental guidelines.We have proposed a new qualitative approach for ecosystem modeling (cf. 4.3 ) based on timed automata (TA) formalism combined to a high-level query language for exploring scenarios.

To date, EcoMata is dedicated to ecosystems that can be modeled as a collection of species (prey-predator systems) under various human pressures and submitted to environmental disturbances. It has two main parts: the Network Editor and the Query Launcher. The Network Editor let a stakeholder describe the trophic food web in a graphical way (the species icons and interactions between them). Only few ecological parameters are required and the user can save species in a library. The number of qualitative biomass levels is set as desired. An efficient algorithm generates automatically the network of timed automata. EcoMata provides also a dedicated window to help the user to define different fishing pressures, a nice way being by using chronograms. In the Query Launcher, the user selects the kind of query and the needed parameters (for example the species biomass levels to define a situation). Results are provided in a control panel or in files that can be exploited later. Several additional features are proposed in EcoMata: building a species library, import/export of ecosystem model, batch processing for long queries, etc. EcoMata is developed in Java (Swing for the GUI) and the model-checker called for the timed properties verification is UPPAAL .

The following website is devoted to the presentation of ECOMATA : http://oban.agrocampus-ouest.fr:8080/ecomata .