Loading...
 

BITE

the Biotic Disturbance Engine

BITE is a general model to simulate biotic disturbances in forest ecosystems. BITE is a modeling framework that is general enough to simulate a wide range of biotic disturbance agents, from fungi to large mammals. The framework is also simple and modular (in order to also be applicable in situations where knowledge about an agent is limited, as is the case with new invaders). BITE allows the quantification of the impacts of emerging pests and pathogens on forests in time and space.

BITE is coupled with iLand and its implementation makes heavy use of the Javascript Engine provided by Qt (and also used by iLand). The implementation of agents in BITE is purely done in Javascript (which accesses the BITE engine written in C++). A BiteAgent consists of several BiteItems; each item implements one aspect of the life cycle of an agent.

Full BITE documentation

Integration in iLand

Project file

BITE is enabled and disabled in the project file.

In section "modules" (similar to e.g. the fire module):

keydescription
enabledboolean switch to enable (true) or disable (false) the module.
filepath to a Javascript file that contains the definition of agents. Note that further files can be included via the include() function of iLand.


 

Outputs

 

Annual summary for each Bite agent

Table Name: bite
The output provides annual statistics for each simulated biotic agent.

captiondatatypedescription
yearintegersimulation year
agentstringname of the biotic agent
NColonizedintegerNumber of cells that were (at the end of the year, without mortality) colonized by the agent
NDispersingintegerNumber of cells that were actively spreading the agent in this year
NNewlyColonizedintegerNumber of cells that were newly colonized in this year
agentBiomassdoubletotal biomass of the agent (on all active cells, if applicable)
treesKilledintegernumber of host trees killed in the current year
volumeKilleddoubletotal volume (m3) of trees killed by the agent in the current year
totalImpactdoubletotal impact (e.g. for defoliatores foliage mass consumed)
saplingImpactintegernumber of sapling cohorts affected (browsing)
saplingKilledintegernumber of sapling cohorts killed

Bite cell level output

Table Name: user defined
Bite cell level output. This output is defined by the agents via Javascript (using a BiteOutput item).
See: http://iland-model.org/bite/#/BiteOutput

In addition to the user-defined columns, the output includes a number of fixed columns.

These are:

captiondatatypedescription
yearintegersimulation year
idxintegercell index (cell Id) (see 'index' variable), useful for spatial analysis
hostTreesintegernumber of host trees (>4m, passing the 'hostFilter') in the current year
treesKilledintegernumber of host trees killed (>4m) in the current year
volumeKilleddoubletotal volume (m3) of trees killed (>4m) by the agent in the current year
totalImpactdoubletotal impact (e.g. for defoliatores foliage mass consumed)
hostSaplingsintegernumber of sapling cohorts that are potential host in the current year (depending on the current filtering)
saplingImpactintegernumber of sapling cohorts affected (browsing)
saplingKilledintegernumber of sapling cohorts killed


 


Created by werner. Last Modification: Thursday 02 of September, 2021 12:30:08 GMT by admin.