Understanding ecological systems requires students to grasp the interactions among wildlife populations, human activities, and environmental processes. Yet these relationships are characterized by nonlinear dynamics, feedback loops, and emergent behaviors that are often difficult to communicate through traditional teaching approaches. Agent-Based Models (ABMs) offer an opportunity to transform these abstract concepts into interactive learning experiences.
This contribution presents WM-Classroom v1.0, a didactic multi-species agent-based model developed in NetLogo to support environmental education and wildlife-management training. The model simulates a simplified predator-prey-harvest system composed of wolves, deer, wild boar, and human harvesters operating within a virtual landscape. Through a transparent set of behavioral rules governing movement, feeding, reproduction, predation, legal harvest, and optional predator control, learners can explore how individual decisions and management interventions influence system-wide outcomes.
Although designed primarily as an educational tool rather than a predictive management instrument, exploratory simulations produced ecologically meaningful patterns. Population trajectories reproduced predator-prey oscillations consistent with theoretical expectations, while the two ungulate species displayed contrasting responses to harvest pressure, with wild boar showing greater resilience than deer. Changes in hunter density and hunting season length also generated indirect effects on wolf populations through prey depletion, illustrating how management actions targeting a single component of the system may propagate across trophic levels.
From a pedagogical perspective, WM-Classroom v1.0 supports inquiry-based learning by allowing students to formulate hypotheses, conduct virtual experiments, and interpret the consequences of alternative management scenarios. The visual and interactive nature of the model bridges the gap between theoretical ecology and real-world decision-making, fostering systems thinking and a deeper understanding of sustainability challenges.
The model is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in ecology, conservation biology, and environmental management, as well as for outreach activities and stakeholder workshops. More broadly, it demonstrates how agent-based modelling can promote environmental literacy by making the complexity of human-wildlife systems both accessible and experimentally explorable.