“Wolves have a complex ecology and the Xgrid cluster will run simulations faster than any other solution. It is critical to my research.”
Dr Guillaume Chapron, Assistant Professor,
Grimsö Wildlife Research Station at Swedish University Of Agricultural Sciences
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences: Xgrid runs with the wolves
Using Apple technology, the Grimsö Wildlife Research Station in Sweden is learning important techniques for sustainable management of the wolf population. Based at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), the station is using an Apple Xgrid cluster system – provided by the Apple Research & Technology Support programme (ARTS) – to understand wolf demography and develop optimal management strategies. Its work will have a deep impact on how mankind interacts with these ancient but troublesome predators.
“Wolf populations are expanding through natural return to past habitats in Europe, or through reintroduction by Government agencies in the US”, explains Dr Guillaume Chapron, Assistant Professor, Grimsö Wildlife Research Station at SLU. “They are posing problems, however - to hunters or sheep farmers, for example. So the urgent question is how we ensure wolf populations can survive, while still allowing for some population control. Wolves have a complex ecology and the Xgrid cluster will run simulations faster than any other solution. It is critical to our research”.
SLU is a modern university, designed to confront and explore many of today’s most compelling environmental questions, “whether it is the food we eat, or the animals we husband on our farms or love as pets, or the forests that we wander through”.
The University delivers undergraduate, master and doctoral courses in subjects ranging from agricultural economics to farm building to urban landscaping. It has more than 4,000 students who work at a network of campuses and research stations across Sweden. SLU is fast developing an international reputation for teaching and research, reflecting the fact that many of its areas of study have global causes and solutions.
Grimsö Wildlife Research Station is part of SLU, and is the focus for research into wildlife such as terrestrial carnivores in Scandinavia, including the lynx, wolverine and wolf. Research into the wolf population is particularly important in Sweden. The wolf population was close to extinction when the species became protected by law in 1966, but it is now growing by 10% per year. That recovery creates cohabitation problems with people, however, particularly hunters of roe deer and moose. Without a clear understanding of the population dynamics, increased poaching could push the already inbred Scandinavian wolf population towards extinction.
Dr Chapron has brought a new dimension to ecological research at Grimsö: simulation modelling of wildlife populations and their management. “We can build a population model to see how wolf numbers would be affected by selective removal in response to people’s concerns, for example, and provide a portfolio of sustainable management strategies to decision makers”, he explains. “Computer modelling is particularly valuable in studying the wolf demography which is strongly shaped by social interactions at the pack level”.
When they were considering the best technology platform, Dr Chapron and the team favoured an object oriented programming approach, because of the complex modelling requirements. In their simulation models, every wolf is described as an ‘object’ and characterised by its biological ‘patterns’ (sex, social status, pack, age, etc.). Packs are also considered as objects with their own patterns. Because the model considers pack dynamics from individual rules, the demographic consequences of sociality are emerging properties of the model, and are not predefined by equations as in more traditional population models. But to run such models, they also needed distributed computing to speed up simulations.
