Bruce and Lucie coordinated a discussion of spatial and temporal variability in Narragansett Bay. The students participated in an interactive whiteboard brainstorming session to come up with a list of drivers that might cause spatial or temporal change to the steady-state food web models they had been creating the last few weeks in class. They came up with:



Lucie challenged students to offer ideas on how the driver would affect the bay while Bruce asked students to categorize drivers as being mostly spatial in affect, mostly temporal in affect, or more closely spatial and temporal in affect.

Bruce then reminded the class of the first day exercise of sharks and striped bass and provided some Python code to play with (as a Jupyter Python notebook named sharks-stripers.ipynb). The first three code sections in the notebook set up the exercise for iterative play. The fourth step can be run for as many timesteps as desired. Plots of the before state, cumulative animal counts, and after timestep state of the bay are shown after the fourth step is run. For example, after 13 timesteps in the image here:



Nicole Flacchia, a graduate student working with Chris on an NPZD model for Narragansett Bay, gave a half-hour introductory presentation on NPZD modeling with a fifteen minute question and answer period that led to further discussion.



Lucie and Bruce suggested the simple steps that would be taken in the next class session to start building a temporal model. Bruce offered to start the class period answering code questions on the sharks and stripers code provided above. Students were encouraged to improve the code if they found any errors in the logic as well as play with the different variables to see how each affected the outputs.