Exercises

Individual exercises to help test your understanding and knowledge of key areas of text. Complete them to see your strengths and weaknesses.

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Extra Resources

Please use the instructions below to download the following files to use in NetLogo.

  • SimRed_Model1.nlogo
  • SimRed_Model2.nlogo
  • SimRed_Model3.nlogo
  • SimRed_Model4.nlogo

Click here to download the zip file. 

These model files are for the model mentioned in the book chapter text.

They are for use in NetLogo, available from: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Right click and ‘Save As…” to save the file to your computer, then open from your computer using NetLogo.

The code is also available on GitHub at http://github.com/jamesdamillington/KeyMethodsInGeography

See the suggested exercises below for ideas on how to explore them.

Alongside these exercises you should also explore the tutorials that are available for NetLogo website: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/

Exercises

Model 1

  • See how patterns vary for different establishment rules and random number generator seeds (i.e., different values of rand-seed).

 

Model 2

  • Vary values of rainfall-rate and plant-water-req to examine the influence on number and patterns of plants that grow and spread.
  • Vary the establishment option to see how this influences patterns of vegetation. For which option do you see fewer (but larger) clusters of vegetation?
  • Use the rand-seed slider to enable consistent comparisons.

 

Model 3

  • Examine combinations of p-dep, wind-strength and initial-depth to see how different forms (spatial patterns of heights of sand) vary over time (>50,000 ticks).
  • Also, examine how patterns differ for different wind-direction.

 

Model 4

  • Try changing the log-alpha value (producing different values for alpha, the memory parameter) to change the TSF Curve and the ignition-rate value to change the number of ignitions per timestep.
  • Look at how these changes influence the size of fires and how restricted they are by patterns of vegetation.