Speaker
Description
The movement and behavior of small organism collectives can often play a key role in ecosystem function. One example is marine larval plankton which are critical for the health of filter feeders such as coral reefs and jellyfish. However, holistic modeling of scenarios like these can be a difficult multiscale problem involving individual locomotion dynamics within larger-scale flows. To address this problem, Dr. Christopher Strickland has developed an open-source, agent-based modeling library in the Python programming language called Planktos. It is targeted at collective behavior in 2D and 3D fluid environments with immersed structures and readily interacts with computational fluid dynamics data generated externally. In this talk, I present mathematical models for collective behavior and then apply them to novel and biologically interesting scenarios involving fluid flows and immersed boundaries- all within the Planktos framework.
