[HN Gopher] Computer simulation helps test land management techn...
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Computer simulation helps test land management techniques to help
bumblebees
Author : rbanffy
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-08-16 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.exeter.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.exeter.ac.uk)
| mcdonje wrote:
| Cool project. Confusing headline. They made models to help
| research land management strategies that would be potentially
| helpful for bees.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Or did they create a matrix for the bees? Somewhere we could
| upload their consciousness to where they can live happy bee
| lives, presumably every bee gets to be the queen in this safe
| space.
| ASpaceCowboi wrote:
| I'll tell ya whats next, VR Blockchain for Bees!
| shapefrog wrote:
| AI VR Blockchain, for Bees.
| whynotkeithberg wrote:
| Quick... Someone make BEES on BSC.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| All bumblebees (genus Bombus) are queens. You are thinking
| honeybees (genus Apis), where mostly there is a single queen
| to a hive.
|
| They use a different matrix.
| bsza wrote:
| Wikipedia disagrees with you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombus_terrestris
| dang wrote:
| We've updated the title to try to make it more accurate.
| Thanks!
| mutagen wrote:
| Website and models available at https://beehave-model.net/
|
| Original model implemented in NetLogo (as described on the page).
|
| Some papers I found looking for the model:
|
| https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111...
|
| https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111...
|
| Wish I had some time to explore making a game out of something
| like this while preserving as much of the accurate simulation as
| possible.
| valgor wrote:
| Step 1: Don't be a farmer. Conservation is not about using
| nature, but the opposite.
|
| Step 2: Plant native plants and then don't touch the land. Ever.
| hinkley wrote:
| This brings to mind the old quip about engineering and designing
| a bridge that stays up - barely.
|
| There's a fine line between improving survival and finding the
| absolute bare minimum to prevent loss. Situations change, and
| red-lining nature is always, always going to end in unpleasant
| surprised.
| Rochus wrote:
| Well, it's a simulation. You can also use your time and resources
| to provide suitable plants for the bees in reality;
| http://hummelgarten.ch/dokumente/ has been very useful to me;
| there are tutorials and tables on how to best plant your green
| spaces that the bees are well taken care of throughout the year;
| this also works in the city.
| throw149102 wrote:
| I spent a few minutes looking at this "BEE-Steward" and it's
| corresponding models, BEEHAVE and BEESCOUT, and the underlying
| NetLogo language that is used to model these things.
|
| I guess I immediately have a few questions - How do we know that
| the model corresponds to reality at all? I mean, I know we have
| experiments to confirm what impacts the bees, but it seems like
| there could be a massive amount of variety depending on different
| factors. I'd love to see some research showing that BEE-Steward
| can work in real scenarios. Right now, they just have a
| simulation showing "hey, if we change x and y we can get 5x more
| bees", but does that actually correspond to reality?
|
| Secondly, how do we make farmers actually _want_ to use this? Do
| they get paid for taking care of bees on their land? I know this
| is just a policy question, but it 's still important to answer.
| Do farmers need any training to use this? Can we collect data in
| an automated fashion to reduce the work the farmers have to do?
| This almost sounds like a deep learning problem - use a camera to
| map + classify areas of farmland, how many pollinators they have,
| the presence of bees, etc.
|
| Finally, what is the fundamental problem of bee modeling? Is it
| fundamentally a computational problem (where we know the rules,
| but computing the model can be hard) or is it a data problem
| (where we know how to compute how the bees will behave, we can do
| it efficiently, but coming up with rules that bees actually
| follow is hard)? I've noted that the NetLogo environment by
| default will only take up 1GB of RAM, which is already not very
| much considering the JVM itself will take a pretty big chunk to
| run just about anything.
|
| It would be interesting to start building some sort of "National
| bee model", rather than just working farmland by farmland. Is
| there any project like this in the works?
|
| Either way, I'm sure all of my questions and more are already
| being asked/answered by people much more involved with the
| conservationist field. Just my 2 cents.
| SamBam wrote:
| Agreed. Allow me to be skeptical, but I find it hard to believe
| that less than 4000 lines of NetLogo are going to accurately
| model a system as complex as bee ecosystems.
|
| I say this as someone who has spent _many_ years writing
| ecosystem models for schools (some of them with NetLogo). _Toy_
| models often require more than that to be useful.
|
| You'll have a set of assumptions. You'll have a number of
| formulae that you can individually say there is experimental
| evidence they roughly models reality, if everything else is
| held constant. But you almost certainly do _not_ have the
| experimental evidence to say that when these six formulae are
| interacting together, they will behave in known, deterministic
| ways.
|
| The paper does not appear to show any applications where
| researchers were able to predict something novel using the
| simulation, test it in the real world, and see how well it
| matched the results. Their "results" (if I'm interpreting
| correctly) appear to be mostly summarized in figure 3, which
| seems to be created by trying different settings until the
| model very, very roughly matched some historical dataset.
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| > Do they get paid for taking care of bees on their land?
|
| In the U.K. at least, they do. The government pays you to leave
| some part of your field unused and untouched. It's called
| 'wilding' and it's well paid enough that the subsidy sometimes
| is worth more than any reasonable crop that would grow on that
| patch of land.
|
| Jeremy Clarkson's Farm (of Top Gear fame) had a segment on
| this. My take is that farming is a very subsidy-heavy business.
| mlindner wrote:
| Horrible naming. It is simultaneously, inaccurate, misrepresents
| things, and then also brings up unrelated political concepts to
| mind all at the same time.
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