HIERARCHAL INDUCTIVE PROCESS MODELING AND ANALYSIS ...

5 CONCLUSION
The hierarchal inductive process-modeling framework was effective in its role to cover
two very extensive search spaces in a short amount time and with the availability of
the CIAO data I was able to investigate the usefulness of the software in our search
for the best model representation.
Some of the major observations that can be made throughout this paper are
about the Zooplankton state variable.
Not only did it tend to provide great restrictive
power when its time series was inputted into HIPM as portrayed with its
median activation value and Table 4, but most often some of the good fit models
I selected only differed in the type of Zooplankton grazing process chosen. All
this may suggest one of two things.
Either, that indeed Zooplankton yields the
most important discriminatory power out of all state variables and is the data that
should be collected first and foremost for the Ross Sea ecosystem, or that the way
the Zooplankton entity is defined in the HIPM framework is inadequate for this
type of ecosystem which incidentally weeds out many of the model that are being
searched through (i.e. all the zeros in Table 4 ). This makes for high variability in
structure for the good fit models selected which in turn creates an array of dynamic
some of which are at opposite end of the spectrum (i.e. zooplankton population
going to extinction in some case or going to the carrying capacity in other) when
HIPM is provided with time-series data that are not that of Zooplankton. The other
explanation about the issues encountered with Zooplankton could be found not in
the way Zooplankton is defined in the process library but rather in an assumption
made within the biological knowledge encoded into HIPM. Indeed, Phaeocystis are
assumed to be grazing resistant to zooplankton, meaning that it is more difficult for
zooplankton to graze upon on Phaeocystis than it is on diatoms; the later not being
included in the process-library as we will discuss later on. Hence, the inability for
65