A World Without Bees: simulating important agricultural insect pollinators

该项目计划开发一个软件模型，以评估作物在传粉者种群变化下的生存能力，并建议哪些花卉性状应成为育种目标，以确保作物的可持续发展。昆虫对农业至关重要，但它们的种群正在以人们知之甚少的方式发生变化，这可能会影响人类的粮食供应。该项目计划构建基于进化代理的作物授粉昆虫变化模型：蜜蜂，熊蜂，无刺蜂和苍蝇。然后，它计划模拟这些人口变化如何影响产量，预测花卉性状繁殖到作物植物中，以持续授粉成功。另一个预期的成果是一个灵活的植物传粉昆虫模拟特定的视觉感知，觅食行为，生理因素和物种间的相互作用。

The project plans to develop a software model to assess the viability of crops under changes in pollinator populations, and recommend which floral traits should be breeding targets to ensure sustainable crops. Insects are essential to agriculture, but their populations are changing in poorly understood ways that are likely to affect human food supplies. This project plans to construct evolutionary agent-based models of change in crop-pollinating insects: honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees and flies. It then plans to model how these population changes affect production, predicting floral traits to breed into crop plants for ongoing pollination success. Another expected outcome is a flexible plant–pollinator simulation of insect-specific visual perception, foraging behaviour, physiological factors and inter-species interactions.