The pace and scale of anthropogenic environmental change has caused the widespread degradation of ecosystems and the services they provide that ultimately support human life on Earth. Understanding and mitigating these impacts necessitates the development of a suite of tools, including policy instruments, practical conservation measures, and empirical research. At present, a variety of models are used to assist decision-making in relation to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Most are correlative, relying on statistical relationships derived from limited observational data without explicit reference to the underlying mechanisms; examples include the GLOBIO model, species distribution models, and models of local extinction based on species–area relationships. All of these models are useful, for different purposes. However, what is urgently needed is mechanistic models, which explicitly represent the biological, physiological, and ecological mechanisms underlying the systems in question. One of the key benefits of mechanistic models is that they are likely to make more accurate predictions under novel conditions. For example, Earth System Models (ESMs), containing mechanistic descriptions of multiple interacting components of the climate, atmosphere, and ocean, are used to project properties and dynamics under future climate conditions that have not been observed previously (at least in relation to historical data). Similarly, mechanistic models of ecosystems would allow us to predict a given combination of human pressures on a given ecosystem, even when there is no or little historical data on which to rely. Mechanistic models can also improve our understanding of the systems being modelled, allowing predictions to be understood in relation to the underlying mechanisms that generate them. This in turn might lead to novel ways to mitigate or even reverse the degradation of ecosystems.

The Madingley Model covers almost all organisms in ecosystems, from the smallest to the largest, encoding the underlying biology and behaviour of individual organisms to capture the interactions between them and with the environment, to model the fate of each individual organism, and to make predictions about ecosystem structure and function.