Tableau I, Piet Mondrian Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Public Domain

Phragmites Management Look-Up Table

A Tool for Phragmites Adaptive Management Strategies

Screenshot of Mondrian simulation showing individual connected stems (ramets) as dots. Different colored ramets represent different species. The model area is divided into grid cells (squares) which define the "neighborhood" for plant competition. The color of each square is depicting the amount of C accretion in each grid cell.

About Mondrian

Mondrian is a computer simulation model of wetland community and ecosystem ecology. The name is an acronym for Modes Of Nonlinear Dynamics, Resource Interactions, And Nutrient cycling. It is a complex model that was initially developed for ecological research that sought to synthesize across different areas of ecological understanding. The model represents a synthesis of our scientific understanding of the interactions among plant populations and plant communities, including what makes certain plant species invasive under certain conditions, with our scientific understanding of wetland ecosystem processes including carbon storage, nutrient cycling and nutrient retention (Currie et al. 2014, Martina et al. 2016, Goldberg et al. 2017). It is an individual-based model, meaning it simulates thousands of wetland plants as individuals and simulates the nutrient competition and light environment (including shading by neighbors) experienced differentially by each individual plant. It runs on a daily time step, simulating plant interactions throughout the entire growing season, as well as the over-winter survival of rhizomes and ecological and hydrological processes that continue to occur through the non-growing season. It simulates plant mortality due to flooding, as well as changes in C and N cycling that occur with fluctuating water levels. It simulates the arrival of plant propagules from adjacent wetland areas, and the clonal growth and differential rates of expansion of different plant species across a wetland -- with an emphasis on their ecological competition with one another as best understood by the current state of the science.

Mondrian was recently expanded to simulate the effects of wetland management and restoration practices to control invasive plants in coastal wetlands (Elgersma et al. 2017). With such a strong emphasis on ecological competition among species on a daily time scale, we recognized that we could simulate the effects of mowing, burning, and herbicide differentially on invasive and native species, and that we could explore different combinations of these management practices on different dates of the year and under the full range of environmental conditions that occur in the Great Lakes region.

Although to date, the model has been applied only in Great Lakes coastal wetlands, we designed Mondrian so that it could be used by different research groups to address a wide variety of research questions in different wetland systems. Hundreds of parameters that represent plant traits or environmental drivers can be changed by the user by making simple changes to parameters that are contained in input files. At the same time, because site-measured values for such a wide array of parameters are often not available, default values are supplied for each parameter. Many of the parameters that represent plant traits are species-specific, allowing us to simulate realistic differences among native plants, as well as differences between native and invasive plants. Mondrian was designed to allow exploration of a range of questions from theoretical on one end of the spectrum to highly realistic on the other end of the spectrum. Currently it is being used as a powerful tool for research, teaching, and resource management.

If you would like to see a detailed, 70-page user guide that provides much more detail on the model, or to download the full Mondrian model with examples of input files and a default parameter set, visit http://williamcurrie.net . Journal articles describing applications of the model in ecological research are also provided below.

References