Getting started with SORTIE

In this document:
How does SORTIE work?
How do I start working with SORTIE?

How does SORTIE work?

It is important when starting with SORTIE to understand a little bit about how SORTIE works. SORTIE is a program designed to simulate the life cycles of individual trees and assess the impacts of various external events on them. SORTIE does this by creating individual virtual trees and allowing certain processes chosen by the user to act on these trees. These processes are called behaviors and usually correspond to biological processes. For instance, a simulation might consist of three behaviors: a behavior to calculate light levels for trees, one to determine the amount of tree growth as a result of the amount of light, and one to select trees to die if they grow too slowly. The behaviors have a certain order in which they act. When all of the behaviors have acted once, that's a single timestep. The process is repeated for the number of timesteps that you set, and that's a single simulation, or run.

Different species have different requirements, of course, and trees undergo different processes at various points within their life cycle. Behaviors can be applied to very specific tree subsets and you can use different versions of a similar behavior to get the effects you wish to achieve.

How do I start working with SORTIE?

First, you may want to familiarize yourself with the various parts of the simulation engine. Read about trees, behaviors, and grids (a kind of data structure). Read a little about how a run progresses. Then, you should read about parameter files, which is the way that you input your settings into SORTIE.

Once you've done that, you are ready to start building a parameter file. To create a file from scratch, read the topic creating a parameter file from scratch. Once you have a parameter file, you can read about advanced additions to it in the topic adding to a parameter file.

Once you have a parameter file, you simply load it using the File menu, then choose "Model->Run". That's all there is to it! Wait for the simulation to end, then look at your output files using the model's data visualization capabilities.