

In 1926, wolves were declared extinct in the park due to a lack of hunting regulations. The game’s designers took inspiration from a project to save the habitat of Yellowstone National Park in the USA. Dr Dan Goodman Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Players will learn about various ecological phenomena along the way, and their solutions could help real researchers to understand ecosystems better.” Canine inspiration One day the strategies designed by players may influence decisions made by real conservationists, just like those made to reintroduce wolves back to Yellowstone park. Jonathan Zheng, who developed the game as part of his PhD in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: “This is a fun opportunity to contribute to research that could change policy and affect our natural world. Therefore, players’ successful game strategies could make their way into the research literature and expand our understanding of ecology, potentially helping conservationists to save endangered species and conserve biodiversity.

This means that natural phenomena can be reproduced inside the game, creating ecosystems that behave in realistic ways to provide real-world answers. The in-game processes that decide extinction and survival are modelled using the same equations used by scientists to study real world ecosystems. EcoBuilder lets players build their own ecosystem of plants and animals

They throw together a bunch of species of different shapes and sizes, decide who eats who within the confines of the game, and depending on their decisions species will either survive or go extinct. Climate change and other human interventions pose ongoing threats to how ecosystems function, resulting in changes to carbon flows and even extinctions of certain species.ĮcoBuilder lets players build their own ecosystem of plants and animals. Jonathan Zheng Department of Electrical and Electronic EngineeringĮcosystem research looks at how animals and plants interact with each other and their environment. This is a fun opportunity to contribute to research that could change policy and affect our natural world. Imperial researchers have developed a new ecosystem-building game where players learn about and contribute to vital environmental research.ĮcoBuilder, which is downloadable now on smartphones and tablets, teaches players how ecosystems work and aims to crowdsource solutions to unsolved ecological puzzles.
