McCoy, Sophie J.; Allesina, Stefano; Pfister, Catherine A.; "Ocean acidification affects competition for space: projections of community structure using cellular automata", Proc. R. Soc. B 2016 283 20152561; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2561. Published 2 March 2016
McCoy, Allesina, and Pfister use cellular automata to predict future species interaction changes due to ocean acidification. The rules for the CA are determined by 30 years' worth of data gathered from field experiments, during which the seawater pH has declined. Each cell has a chance of one of three things happening: colonization, disturbance, or overgrowth competition, where the different occurances varied in probability based on the measured data for different pH. They find that disturbance, which represents grazers, promotes coexistence, and as pH decreases along with disturbance, certain species began to dominate. An extension could look into including a death rate for the algae due to the changes of the water, not solely due to grazers, or including an agent-based layer where grazers are agents that go towards the most abundant food.