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ELVIS

The ELVIS Task

Here is Neo's napkin drawing from the January Northern Cal meeting: "Attach:elvis.ppt Δ"

Basically, the Elvis pipeline can be broken into top and bottom halves.

Elvis - Top: A user enters a time and place, and gets back a species list.

Elvis - Bottom: Given a species list, a food web is generated.

There are a number of ElvisUseCases the above pipeline will enable. For example, one idea behind developing this capability is that the abundance of known prey and/or absence of known predators can be an indicator of the likely success of an invasion. Researchers (students) going out into the field can be given field guide information for invasives as well as prey and predator species.

1. Input a location > Get a species list for that location, including known invaders.
2. Build a food web out of the species list, that includes the likely niche of one or more invaders.
3. Return a list of predator and prey in the new ecosystem.

The first step is, in the general case, pretty hard to automate. We'll need to restrict ourselves along at least one of the following dimensions: geography; taxonomy; habitat. (eg birds in California?, riparian plants?). Here's an outline of two ways to do step 1: ElvisStep1.