Chapter 7 is cellular automata: local neighbor rules producing global structure. This expansion points that at a real spreading process, the Asian hornet invasion of Europe.
The page uses GBIF occurrence records for Vespa velutina from 2013 to 2025. Each year’s sightings are stamped onto the grid as live cells, and a probabilistic neighbor rule fills the gaps between the observed years, so the automaton’s growth is tuned to resemble the real invasion front. The actual occurrence points for the current year are drawn on top in dark dots, so you can see the model tracking the data. This is informal model calibration, which is a lot of what spatial ecology actually is.
Data source: GBIF Occurrence API
Endpoint:https://api.gbif.org/v1/occurrence/search?scientificName=Vespa%20velutina&year=YYYY&hasCoordinate=true
Access: Public, no key. Loaded from an hourly server-side refresh when possible, with a bundled snapshot fallback, and a live browser fetch only when the API allows CORS. Data window: Jan 1, 2013 - Dec 31, 2025 (pulled Jul 18, 2026 UTC)
The count of records explodes over the decade (from about 1,700 in 2013 to hundreds of thousands by 2025), which is the invasion itself showing up in the data volume.