The Everglades Landscape Vegetation Succession model (ELVeS) is a spatially-explicit simulation of vegetation community response to environmental changes. The model uses empirically-based probabilistic functions of vegetation community niche space, disturbance responses, and temporal lags in response to expected community response within the model’s domain on an annual basis.
The model has been parameterized for the Everglades spatial domain, including the Water Conservation Areas and Everglades National Park. Transitions between community states are defined with conditional probabilities. Fresh water marsh and wet prairie communities are the only communities currently operational in the model.