SESAME, a software environment for simulation and analysis of marine ecosystems

The software environment SESAME is a model development and analysis tool designed to facilitate the construction of ecological models using Fortran-77 on UNIX machines. It consists of sets of routines which are called from a menu-driven program to perform tasks such as automatic compiling, linking and loading of a model, simulation runs, graphical and numerical output, analysis of results and comparison with available field data. It provides a choice of integration methods for simulating continuous processes and can also handle discrete processes such as encountered in systems with age- or size-structured populations. One essential feature of the package is a routine which links submodules unambiguously by automatically generating the information which needs to be common to all sections of the model. This feature, together with the concept of the distributed derivative, makes SESAME especially useful to interdisciplinary teams working on the simultaneous development and testing of complex, spatially-resolved ecosystem models comprising many modules. Some examples of models constructed with SESAME are mentioned.