(PLEASE NOTE TEMPORARY SCHEDULE AND LOCATION CHANGE FOR THE AM SEMINAR THIS WEEK:) Dear all, Our upcoming AM seminar is held this Thursday 6 April at 11am in the AGR (Carslaw 829). Our speaker is Andrew Bernoff (Harvey Mudd). Talk details follow below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Using Field Data to Inform Agent-Based and Continuous Models of Locust Hopper Bands Abstract: An outstanding problem in mathematical biology is using laboratory and field observations to tune a model’s functional form and parameter values. In this talk I will discuss an ongoing project developing models of the Australian plague locust for which excellent field and experimental data is available. Under favorable environmental conditions flightless locust juveniles may aggregate into coherent, aligned swarms referred to as hopper bands. We will develop two models of hopper bands in tandem; an agent-based model that tracks the position of individuals and a partial differential equation model that describes locust and resource density. By examining 4.4 million parameter combinations, we identify a set of the problem’s ten parameters that reproduce field observations. I will then discuss two ongoing efforts to improve this model. The first uses ideas from dynamical systems and continuum mechanics to extend this model into two dimensions by modeling the known tendency of locusts to align using ideas from the Kuramoto model of oscillator synchronization. The second, firmly based in data science, uses motion tracking of tens of thousands of locusts to shed light on how locust movement is informed by interactions with other individuals. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An ongoing list of AM seminars is posted here: https://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/Applied.html See you there, Ian