Computational Model Library

Our mission is to help computational modelers develop, document, and share their computational models in accordance with community standards and good open science and software engineering practices. Model authors can publish their model source code in the Computational Model Library with narrative documentation as well as metadata that supports open science and emerging norms that facilitate software citation, computational reproducibility / frictionless reuse, and interoperability. Model authors can also request private peer review of their computational models. Models that pass peer review receive a DOI once published.

All users of models published in the library must cite model authors when they use and benefit from their code.

Please check out our model publishing tutorial and feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about publishing your model(s) in the Computational Model Library.

Displaying 6 of 6 results insect clear search

Anthill: A harvester ant colony built from the published science

Adrian Diez Cuadrado | Published Thursday, September 17, 2026 | Last modified Thursday, September 24, 2026

An agent-based model of one colony of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius, from the day a mated queen lands to the death of the colony. It runs in a web browser and, unchanged, headless in Node for replicate studies.

What the ants do: a claustral queen digs her own shaft and raises the first workers on her reserves; workers dig the nest under local rules, with no ant holding a plan; a one-way, age-based division of labour set by the season of birth, which no shortage reverses; trunk-trail foraging with site fidelity and recruitment; seed storage, opening and germination in the chambers, which is what feeds the larvae; daily weather from the climate normals of the study site, with drought years; nuptial flights after heavy rain; corpse removal; alarm at a disturbance on the foraging ground; and annual nest relocation, in which the store and then the brood are carried along the trail to a new nest the colony digs.

Every value in the model is tagged as measured in this species, borrowed from another ant, or invented, with its source, in a single parameter file. The model is deterministic: one seeded stream per system and a fixed one-minute timestep, so a seed reproduces a run bit for bit in the browser and in Node, which a test pins. A study writes a methods report listing the invented values the results rest on and the acceptance tests the model fails.

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This NetLogo model simulates the impact of mowing frequency, mower type and the percentage of refuge strips on the abundance of arthropods in managed grasslands. It represents five functional arthropod groups: holometabolous plant-dwelling arthropods (HoP, represented by butterflies); holometabolous ground-dwelling arthropods (HoG, represented by ants); nesting pollinators (NP, represented by bees); hemimetabolous plant-dwelling arthropods (HeP, represented by grasshoppers); and ground-resident arthropods (GR, represented by spiders). Three mowing frequencies are simulated: intensive (four mowings per year), intermediate (two mowings per year) and extensive (one mowing per year). Bar and disc mowers differ in their effects on arthropod mortality and vegetation height. Refuge strip coverage can be set to 0%, 10% or 20%. Arthropod abundance changes over time through movement, reproduction, natural mortality, mower-related mortality and vegetation regrowth.

At the heart of a study of Social-Ecological Systems, this model is built by coupling together two independently developed models of social and ecological phenomena. The social component of the model is an abstract model of interactions of a governing agent and several user agents, where the governing agent aims to promote a particular behavior among the user agents. The ecological model is a spatial model of spread of the Mountain Pine Beetle in the forests of British Columbia, Canada. The coupled model allowed us to simulate various hypothetical management scenarios in a context of forest insect infestations. The social and ecological components of this model are developed in two different environments. In order to establish the connection between those components, this model is equipped with a ‘FlipFlop’ - a structure of storage directories and communication protocols which allows each of the models to process its inputs, send an output message to the other, and/or wait for an input message from the other, when necessary. To see the publications associated with the social and ecological components of this coupled model please see the References section.

TIMELY Model

Pia Backmann | Published Thursday, September 19, 2019

An individual-based model to evaluate, whether time delays in plant responses to insect herbivory can be beneficial for the plant.

Root disease model

Adam Bouche | Published Sunday, September 30, 2018

This is a model of root disease spread between trees in the landscape. The disease spreads via two transmission processes: (a) root contact/root graft transmission between adjacent trees and (b) insect vectors that carry spores between trees. Full details can be found in the “Info” tab in the model and in the readme file in the GitHub repository.

Population Dynamics of Emerald Ash Borer

mpeters | Published Monday, December 13, 2010 | Last modified Saturday, April 27, 2013

This model was developed as part of a class project, and explores the population dynamics and spread of an invasive insect, Emerald Ash Borer, in a county.

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