Birth of a canyon

Although this landscape has only just been created, there is nothing new about it. In fact, this is a numerical model of the ecosystem of the Bright Angel Trail, a hiking path located in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona (US). Using the underlying terrain, as well as environmental and biological data, the system deployed here can reconstruct a landscape by automatically selecting various plant and animal species and placing them in the most suitable location. The different plants are grouped together on the cliffs or at the bottom of the valley where water flows, while the animals travel from resource to resource, forming paths along the most commonly used routes. This tool makes it possible to model and test ecosystems that are no longer accessible today, with a view to helping palaeontologists investigate their research subjects and validate their hypotheses. This image is a winner of the 2021 La preuve par l'image (LPPI) competition.