Practical guidelines for modeling how organisms use energy throughout life

What is it about?

All organisms need energy to stay alive, grow, develop, and reproduce. How they obtain and use that energy changes throughout their lives and depends on their environment, including factors such as food availability and temperature. Scientists can use mathematical models to bring this information together and predict how organisms may respond when their environment changes. Dynamic Energy Budget theory, or DEB theory, is one framework for doing this. It has been applied to thousands of species, but turning biological observations into a working DEB model can be difficult, especially for researchers using the approach for the first time. In this paper, we guide readers through that process step by step: deciding what the model needs to represent, finding and evaluating suitable data, implementing the model, estimating its parameters, checking whether its predictions make biological sense, and making the final model reproducible and reusable. We use zebrafish as a worked example and compare models built with different amounts of biological data to show how the information available affects what a model can reliably tell us.

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Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash

Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Previous introductions to DEB theory have largely focused on explaining its theoretical and mathematical foundations. Our work complements these resources by focusing on the practical decisions researchers face when actually building a DEB model. We bring the different stages of model development together into a structured six-step workflow and provide guidance on common problems involving model design, data selection, parameter estimation, and validation. By making these steps more explicit, we aim to lower the barrier to using DEB theory and promote models that are more biologically coherent, transparent, reproducible, and reusable.