🌿 Ecosystem Science for Beekeepers

About this simulation

Ecologists rarely judge an apiary's footprint from a single number. They set up a ring of monitoring plots around the hives, track a biodiversity index at each one over time, and ask two questions: is the landscape stable (do readings stay steady, or swing wildly), and does colony pressure correlate with changes in the surrounding flora and native pollinators? This scene turns that fieldwork into a live 3D dashboard.

How it works

• Each glowing column is a monitoring plot; its height is that plot's current biodiversity index, and it jitters more when the ecosystem is less stable.
• Beams from the hive to each plot are the correlation web — green means colony density and plot health rise together, red means one comes at the expense of the other, and beam thickness is the strength of that link.
• Plots closer to the hive feel more foraging pressure from colony density; plots farther out are shaped more by landscape-wide pesticide load and floral diversity.
• Small amber motes are foraging trips leaving the hive — more of them at higher colony density, illustrating the pressure driving the correlations.

Controls

• Colony density — hives per hectare placed around the apiary.
• Pesticide load — background agrochemical exposure across the landscape.
• Floral diversity — richness of forage plants available to pollinators.
• Season — changes bloom cover and light without resetting your readings.
• Correlation web — show or hide the hive-to-plot correlation beams.
• ↺ Resample plots — redraws plot positions and restarts the stability trace.

Did you know?

Real apiary impact studies often use paired-plot designs and multi-year time series precisely because a single snapshot can't separate a genuinely unstable ecosystem from ordinary season-to-season noise.