Abstract
Cave cricket populations are essential to the survival of many rare invertebrates that are endemic to the karst regions of Fort Hood, TX. The organic matter they bring into the caves provides an energy source for many karst invertebrates. Red Imported Fire Ants (RIFA) migrating from South America into the southern USA compete for resources with and prey upon cave crickets, which can indirectly threaten certain populations of rare invertebrates. This chapter describes the development of a simple computer model using NetLogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/) that can be localized to support cave-management activities at a variety of locations affected by RIFA. This model incorporates the expertise of natural resources personnel, information from field studies, and digital mapping data to provide spatially explicit simulations of RIFA competition with cave crickets.
Based on ERDC/CERL TR-09-19, July 2009, with funding support from ERDC-CERL Project 140644, Habitat-Centric SAR (Species at Risk) Research—Multi-Species PVA (Population Viability Analysis).
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Notes
- 1.
An operational copy of this model is available through http://extras.springer.com.
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Rossmann, B., Peterson, T., Drake, J. (2012). A Simulation Model of Fire Ant Competition with Cave Crickets at Fort Hood, Texas. In: Westervelt, J., Cohen, G. (eds) Ecologist-Developed Spatially-Explicit Dynamic Landscape Models. Modeling Dynamic Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1257-1_4
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