OVERVIEW

Full simulation and analysis code used to generate and analyse the data described in the accompanying manuscript "A general relationship between population size and carrying capacity" - Ball et al. https://doi.org/10.33774/coe-2024-m9dqp

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

This code was developed and run on Windows 11 and Linux 6.8.0-45. All code was written using Python 3.12. In addition to the Python Standard Library (https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html) the code is relient on the following packages, which can be installed using pip:

numpy pandas tqdm

additionally the analysis, plotting, and predictive model scripts rely on:

scipy matplotlib sklearn

INSTRUCTIONS

Simulations can be run using 'run_scenarios.py', with simulation parameters being found at the top of that file. The variable 'RESULTS_PATH' dictates the directory in which the simulation results will be saved.

'MULTIPROCESSING_ENABLED' allows simultaneous simulations to be carried out on machines with plentiful resources, 'NUM_WORKERS' governs the number of concurrent processes. Any value should work, though the actual utilisation will depend on available cores in your machine.

Setting 'OVERWRITE_EXISTING_FILES' to True will cause any existing results to be overwritten, otherwise simulations for which results already exist will be skipped (useful if something crashes part-way).

Running the simulations using the unmodified files will produce the quantitative results described in the manuscript.