Persefone.jl: Modelling Biodiversity in Dynamic Agricultural Landscapes

Daniel Vedder , Marco C. Matthies, Gabriel Díaz Iturry, Guy Pe'er

1. Agricultural landscapes are highly dynamic, constantly changing across space and time due to the effects of farm management, plant phenology, and environmental fluctuations. These dynamics play a critical role in shaping biodiversity patterns and contribute to negative population trends in numerous species, but are rarely considered in ecological models of farmland biodiversity.


2. Here, we present Persefone.jl, a new process-based model to study wildlife populations in changing agricultural landscapes. By combining land use maps and daily weather data with submodels for farm management and crop growth, Persefone.jl allows the simulation of spatiotemporal landscape dynamics at high resolution. This lays the foundation for a collection of individual-based models of wildlife animal species, which can be used to evaluate the biodiversity impacts of environmental or management scenarios.


3. To showcase the model’s capabilities, we simulate the population dynamics of one bird and one butterfly species in six agricultural landscapes in Germany. We demonstrate how empirically observed population patterns emerge from the interaction of model processes, including a management-related ecological trap and weather-dependent population fluctuations.


4. Persefone.jl is open-source and designed to be easily transferable and extensible, so that it can be applied to other regions and scenarios, and can be expanded to include new animal species models. We discuss its potential as a flexible tool for both theoretical and applied agroecological research.