Closer to Cayuga’s Waters

Abstract

In recent years, an invasive plant species, Hydrilla verticillate, has been identified to pose significant threats to the local ecology of Cayuga Lake. This paper aims to provide a practical, quantitative, and real time evaluation system that helps monitor and predict the population dynamics of the plant. The system includes two main parts: sampling and simulation. In Section 3, we discuss in detail our stochastic Monte Carlo simulation based on the enhanced Invasive Plant Population Dynamic (IPPD) model. Human activities, such as boating, are identified to greatly accelerate the spread of Hydrilla. In Section 4, we employ statistical methods to promote confidence in the sample results, which in turn guarantees more accurate simulation results. We provide an adaptive algorithm to calculate the minimum sample size in real time. Other than the practical utility of our study, there is also the theoretical importance in that various approaches discussed in this paper, such as the IPPD model and the adaptive algorithm, can serve as the basis for future work on this subject.