Quantitative tools are essential to conduct research in modern ecology. To facilitate this the Centre offers computational support that is on par with the best in the world. The Lotka-Volterra Mathematical Ecology Laboratory, located in the A wing of the third floor of the Biological Sciences Building, is a departmental computational facility that the members of the Centre use for quantitative analysis of ecological data and mathematical and computational modeling of ecological systems, as well as to conduct classes and workshops.

Technical specifications: We have installed the Linux operating system (Ubuntu distribution) on these computing desktop systems (named Volterra1, Volterra2 and so on), which are networked via a file server (named Lotka). We have also installed software packages that are useful in ecological data analysis and modeling, such as R, Matlab, qGIS, Maxent, Mathematica, GNU libraries, CUDA and software for phylogenetic analyses.

Requests for usage: Any person affiliated to CES can request for a login address for these systems to our System Administrator (arunmc@iisc.ac.in) with a brief statement of purpose. If you would like to use this facility for conducting workshops related to computing, please send your requests to guttal@iisc.ac.in and cc arunmc@iisc.ac.in with details of the workshop, what would be the usage of computer, any special software needed and how many people could attend. This facility is typically not to be used for group meetings or conducting classes, since it may obstruct regular computer usage, unless it involves computing-related work.

The lab is maintained by Mr. Arunkumar and Dr. Vishwesha Guttal.