The first meeting of STEEMI, the Student Ecological and Environmental Modelling Initiative took place on Tuesday 7th February 2012.  I met up with four students studying for a BSc in Ecological Science at the University of Edinburgh, and we discussed the value of models within ecology, and the potential to improve the practice of modelling.

Ecological and environmental models are a vital tool for capturing our understanding of complex human/nature systems, and for exploring possible futures in the face of unprecedented global challenges.

It is now possible to load, parameterize, execute and interrogate a previously saved Simile model within an R language script.
The interface package for doing so is available via The Comprehensive R Archive Network (http://cran.r-project.org) by the name Simile. Current version is 1.1. It is compatible with all Simile platforms, and requires Simile version 5.8 or later.

Simile v5.9 is a maintenance release, providing incremental improvements to many existing features and fixing some problems that have come up.

Simile 5.8 is now listed on at Mac Informer, a system maintenance tool for the Mac.

What's new in Simile v5.0?

Released December 2007

Simile 5.0 has the same fast response time when editing very large models as when editing small ones, and builds even the largest models (over 2000 components) in around a minute. It has adaptive step size control, for more efficient model execution. There are also a large number of other improvements and bug fixes. Here is a list of some of the more significant improvements that have been made over Simile v4.9: