Basic Principles

Which general concepts, theories, hypotheses, or modeling approaches are underlying the model's design?

illustrate macro levels based on micro levels. Existing idea, theory, modelling approaches

Mass Panic Theory

• Panic = inappropriate fear &/ fight and highly intense fear/ fight
• Mass Panic = Since the crowd is less intelligent and more driven by simple emotions, the crowd reaction to an emergency will be disproportionate regarding the danger and will spread quickly and widely throughout all the individuals gathered

Affiliation and Normative Approach

• The typical response of thtoats and disasters is not to flee but to seek the proximity of familiar persons and places.
• Separation from attachment figures is a greater stress factor than physical danger.  

This concept relates the model to existing ideas, theories, hypotheses, and modeling approaches, to place the model within its larger context. These principles can occur at both the model level (e.g., does the model address a question that has been addressed with other models and methods?) and at the agent level (e.g., what theory for agent behavior does the model use, and where did this theory come from?). Describing such basic principles makes a model seem more a part of science and not made up without consideration of previous ideas. Describe: • The general concepts, theories, hypotheses, or modeling approaches underlying the model’s design, at both the system and agent levels. • How these basic principles are taken into account. Are they implemented in submodels or is their scope the system level? Is the model designed to provide insights about the basic principles themselves, i.e. their scope, their usefulness in real-world scenarios, validation, or modification? • Whether the model uses new or existing theory for the agent behaviors from which system dynamics emerge. What literature or concepts are agent behaviors based on?

• This model addresses a classic problem of conservation ecology known as population viability analysis (PVA). This problem is to estimate the risk of a plant or animal population going extinct within a certain time period, and how that risk could be reduced by alternative management actions. There is an extensive literature on PVA, largely based on models that operate at the population and metapopulation levels (a metapopulation being a collection of populations linked such that individuals can disperse among them) and largely based on stochastic processes driven by probability parameters. This model differs from classical PVA models in two ways. First, it is not simply a population- (or metapopulation-) level model but instead explicitly represents lower levels of organization within the population (see Collectives, below). Second, while this model is highly stochastic (see Stochasticity, below), it is also driven by mechanistic processes and adaptive behavior within the population.
• At the system level, this model addresses a well-known management problem of agricultural and ecological systems: how does land use, including both the amounts of different land uses and their spatial arrangement, affect both agricultural production and wildlife conservation? For example, are these two goals best met by separating intensive agriculture from natural reserves or by conducting agriculture in ways that also support wildlife? Such questions are especially interesting and complex when wildlife provides services such as pest control to agriculture, as in this model. In its bird foraging submodel (Section 2.3.7.1, below), this model poses a classic problem of optimal foraging theory: how should an individual decide whether to stay and feed in its current location and when to move on to another location? There is extensive literature on this problem, much of it based on the influential “marginal value theorem” of Charnov (1976). However, here this problem is posed in a more complex and realistic context than typically addressed in the foraging theory literature, especially because this is a population model with multiple birds depleting and competing for food. We provide insight into this problem by contrasting four alternative theories for this decision by how well they reproduce a variety observed patterns (Section 3).
• The basic principle of the Segregation model is the idea that it was designed to illustrate: that strong individual behaviors may not be necessary to produce striking system patterns. Does the presence of strong segregation mean that individual households are highly intolerant, or can such strong patterns emerge in part from the system’s structure? Understanding this principle can be critical for developing policies to address social issues such as segregation.