ModMED logo ModMED Home page -  Aims and Objectives - Software -  Participants -  Publications

ModMED

Modelling Mediterranean
Ecosystem Dynamics

Obtaining ModMED Software

The ModMED Project has been busy developing several different pieces of software for modelling vegetation dynamics. Several of these are already freely available over the Web as indicated below. Others are still being developed and will be made available later.

Initial stages in the development of ModMED involved the building of specific software 'hard-wired' for very specific tasks. These have now been superceded by the geeral modelling environment provided by Simile (formerly called AME). Simile has been developed by Robert Muetzelfeld and Jasper Taylor at the University of Edinburgh as part of several different projects, but partly funded by ModMED. Simile is freely available along with extensive exlanations and tutorials from the Simile web site.

Simile will be the main tool used for creating inividual-level and community-level models. Simile can also provide a landscape in which these models will run, but they will also be designed to run within landscapes modelled using LandLord. LandLord is a modelling environment created by Duncan Heathfield (partly funded by ModMED) and is based on the original ModMED landscape-level model developed while Duncan was based in Edinburgh as part of the ModMED team. LandLord is available over the Web from World-in-a-Box.

We are also investigating ways in which Simile, running as a landscape containing community-level models may be linked to GIS software such as ArcView.

More information and more demonstration software will be added to this page shortly.

All comments on these pages to: Colin Legg
Institute of Ecology and Resource Management
The University of Edinburgh
Darwin Building, King's Buildings
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3JU
Scotland, UK
Last update: 4/4/2000