An agent-based simulation of invasive Argentine black and white tegu (Salvator merianae) population spread across the Florida Everglades, visualized in real time over satellite imagery. Built with pygame, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and Pillow.
For a full mathematical presentation of the model, see the original paper here (model discussion starts on page 8).
Argentine black and white tegus are one of Florida's most damaging invasive species, threatening native wildlife including American alligators, gopher tortoises, and ground-nesting birds. Traditional population models treat spread as a continuous diffusion process, losing the individual-level behavior that drives real invasion dynamics. This project was built to explore whether an agent-based approach, where each tegu makes its own movement and reproduction decisions based on local habitat could better capture the spatial patterns of an active invasion.
Install the required Python packages:
py -3 -m pip install numpy pygame pillow scipy matplotlibRun the viewer with:
py -3 InvasiveTegus.pyW,A,S,D: pan around the map- Mouse wheel: zoom in and out
- Left click on a node to display information
Space: advance the simulation by one timestepH: cycle between no heatmap, desirability heatmap, and tegu-count heatmap- Close the window: exit the program
Each time you press Space, the program advances the simulation by one timestep and saves a frame image into a frames/ folder. Those saved frames can be combined into GIFs like the ones below.
| Seed 1 | Seed 2 |
|---|---|
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GIFs showing two different random initial seeds, each simulated over 100 timesteps, where red represents high habitat desirability, blue represents low habitat desirability, and green represents tegu population density.