Detecting behaviours in ecological models

Given an ecological model, I address the question of how to identify the different dynamical behaviours it can exhibit. This requires three steps: the discrimination of different behaviours, the detection of novel behaviours in the model space given current knowledge on model behaviour and the display of the results for visual inspection. I propose simple heuristic algorithms to carry out these steps in the case of models generating time series. I test the method on three models of increasing complexity, analysing both local and global structures in the time series and demonstrating the flexibility of the approach.