MIKE ECO Lab

MIKE ECO Lab is an open and generic equation solver. MIKE ECO Lab is mostly used for water quality and ecosystem modelling, such as modelling eutrophication of lakes, calculating the fate and transport of heavy metals and determining ecology indicators (e.g. distribution of sea grass). Originally, MIKE ECO Lab was developed as a tool to simulate water quality reactions in surface water, but has been expanded to include agent based modelling and other more complex reactions and components.

In MIKE SHE, MIKE ECO Lab can be used from basic water quality kinetic reactions in surface and groundwater, to complex coupled feedback interactions between nutrients, plant growth and hydrology.

MIKE ECO Lab in MIKE SHE depends on MIKE SHE’s WQ module You must run a WQ simulation after the WM simulation and the WQ module calls MIKE ECO Lab.

When running MIKE SHE + MIKE ECO Lab, MIKE ECO Lab reads concentrations (state variables) from MIKE SHE’s WQ module, reads other necessary input data files, generates additional output and passes modified concentrations (state variables) back to MIKE SHE.

MIKE ECO Lab acts on a cell basis. It is called for each cell in the model. By default it is called at every time step in the MIKE SHE WQ simulation, but optionally can be called less frequently.

Using MIKE ECO Lab is a four step process: 1. Create a MIKE ECO Lab template file that defines the equations to be solved. 2. Specify the name of the template file in the MIKE SHE. 3. Define the links between template variables and MIKE SHE parameters. 4. Run the MIKE SHE Water Quality model.

During the simulation, MIKE SHE passes the State Variables (eg concentrations) to MIKE ECO Lab. MIKE ECO Lab updates the State Variable values and passes them back to MIKE SHE. At the same time, MIKE ECO Lab will write to any specified output files.

The output files are standard dfs2 or dfs3 output files. These files can be used as input in subsequent WM or other WQ simulations, or viewed in the Results Viewer, etc.