Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Speciation and Ecosystem Diversity

The agent-based approach to modeling and simulation (ABMS) has recently become very popular, especially among researchers dealing with biological and social simulations. The ABMS approach allows for modeling complex phenomena, resulting from interactions between many individuals, in a very natural way. The agent-based approach is especially useful when it comes to simulating emergent phenomena, which usually arise from interactions between a large number of individuals, each of which acts according to some simple patterns or rules. In this paper, two agent-based models of species formation processes are presented and experimentally verified. The first one is a model in which speciation takes places as a result of geographic barriers that split the population. In the second the speciation results from existence and interactions between flocks of individuals, which presence restricts mating between individuals from the same species. During experiments, the ecosystem diversity and the number of existing species are measured using entropy-based indicators.