Modeling Seasonality

Abstract

Mathematical phenological models are devices for summarizing what we know of seasonality in biology, or for mimicking the seasonality. There are formulas for discovering and for summarizing recurrence of a phenophase as a function of time only. Also there are models relating the time of the phenophase to the environment, i.e., a correlation between mean temperature and duration of a phenophase. Or the model may have parts and parameters, each with characteristic components of the real thing; we call this a simulator.