What is a behavior?

Behaviors are the active part of a SORTIE simulation. Nothing in the model is pre-defined, default, or automatic. Everything that happens is done by a behavior, and all behaviors are under user control.

Behaviors fall into two categories. The first category is behaviors that act on trees and roughly correspond to biological and environmental processes. These behaviors calculate how much individual trees grow, select trees that will die, distribute seeds, and perform other similar jobs. The second category is behaviors that perform helper functions for the simulation itself. These behaviors do things like measure and calculate forest metrics and write output.

Each behavior has a clearly defined action. Each behavior in a run performs its action once per timestep in a pre-defined order.