About SELES

About SELES modeling platform

The following has been taken from http://www.seles.info/. Please, visit that webpage for more info on SELES.

The Spatially Explicit Landscape Event Simulator (SELES) is a tool for constructing and running spatially explicit spatio-temporal landscape models that allows integrating natural and anthropogenic processes (e.g. fire, insect outbreaks, logging, succession) and track indicators (e.g. age class, habitat supply, timber volumes) over long time-frames and large spatial areas.

The heart of SELES is a high-level, declarative modelling language, used to specify each of the processes and agents acting in a model, and a discrete-event simulation engine that interprets and executes the model. The SELES language is general enough to allow the construction of models that are quasi-continuous, periodic, or episodic; with a fixed or variable time step; that are deterministic, process-oriented, or stochastic; and in which processes may operate locally, regionally, or globally and be either spreading or non-spreading. SELES models can combine aspects of cellular automata, discrete-event simulation, spatio-temporal Markov models, and individual-based models.

SELES landscape events and landscape agents

The behaviour of a SELES model is described with a set of quasi-independent processes or agents of change. Each such agent is called a landscape event or a landscape agent. Behaviours are captured via the following properties: Initial State, Return Time, Event Location, Number of Clusters, Probability of Initiation, Transitions, Spread Time, Spread Location, Number of Spread Recipients, Probability of Spread, EndCluster, and EndEvent.

SELES scenarios

The set of initial conditions (raster layers), coupled with a set of landscape events and agents, is called a scenario. This hierarchy allows us to differentiate between the overall simulation model and the individual spatial raster models, static landscape models and landscape event models that make up the scenario.

A SELES scenario file executes a sequence of commands to perform tasks such as loading spatial information, opening models and running simulations. Scenario files essentially provide a scripting language for setting up and running experiments in SELES.

SELES interface

The SELES user interface is based on Windows NT, and runs best under Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It assumes that the models to be used have already been constructed. The following is a snapshot of the SELES interface, with the different raster layers that conform the state variables in MEDFIRE: