Food Webs #8
Description
A food web is like a petri net where the species are species of organisms and the transitions of consumption events. We should be able to represent them with Dynamical systems based on a conservation of biomass principle. AlgPetri should be able to support the hierarchical definition of a FoodWeb.
Howard Odom (UNC grad, UF Prof) had a theory of ecological systems theory back in the 1970s, which is very compatible with modern ACT approaches. We could implement these diagrams using Decorated Cospans to describe large ecosystems as interacting subsystems.
A good start would be implementing a foodweb as a petrinet (or general open dynamical system connected by resource sharing). Then we could show that you can do Trophic Species Reduction, which merges species if they have the same set of preditors and prey as a symbolic simplification in the resulting category.