## 2 Materials and Methods  
### DIMONA Platform and Model  
#### DIMONA Platform Overview  
_The DIMONA Ecosystem Modelling Platform_, hereafter referred to as _DIMONA_, consists of the web application _DIMONA_online_, referred to as the _DIMONA_ web application, which hosts the mathematical model _DIMONA_, referred as the _DIMONA_ model. _DIMONA_ is an acronym for **D**ynamic **I**ntegrated **M**odel for **O**r**gansim-e**N**vironment **A**nalysis (Copyright (c) 2019 [PERSON], Edmonton, AB, Canada). The _DIMONA_ platform (Figure 1) is designed for the following purposes: (i) process-based (PB) scientific modelling with explanatory and predictive power (Figure 2a,b); (ii) Internet of Things (IoT) real-time modelling (Figure 3); (iii) machine learning (ML) data-driven predictive modelling (Figure 4); (iv) exploring and collecting data on the weather and climate, soil properties, hydrology, and biota (plants, animals, fungi) at any location on the globe by its geographic coordinates (Figure 5). The three modelling components of the _DIMONA_ mathematical model are also referred to as the _DIMONA_ PB, IoT, and ML models. For the above purposes, _DIMONA_ connects with API websites, such as OpenWeatherMap (London, UK), Agro API (London, UK), SoilGrids REST (version 2.0), GBIF (version 1.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, Leaflet (version 1.9.4, Kyiv, Ukraine), or other websites and software as indicated in the _DIMONA_ code. In its current pilot version, _DIMONA_ resides on an HP Pavilion Notebook workstation (laptop) with a hardware configuration of Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50 GHz 2.71 GHz Processor, 12 GB of RAM, and 64-bit operating system. The software environment hosting the _DIMONA_ web application and model executables is MAMP 3.3.1 with a local Apache server and MySQL database server installed on the HP Pavilion laptop and playing the role of web server(s) when their ports are open and accessible on the internet via password-protected ngrok-stable-windows-amd64 internet tunnels. The front-end code, i.e., _DIMONA_'s website graphical user interface (GUI), is written in HTML5 (version 5.0), CSS3 (version 3.0), and JavaScript/Query (version ECMAScript 2019), and the back-end code for operating with the server and the database is written in the PHP7 (version 7.1.5) and MySQL (version 5.6.34) programming languages. The code of the _DIMONA_ PB and IoT models is written in C++ (version ISO C++17) nd the code of the ML model in the C++ and Python3 (version 3.9.6) programming languages. Compiled C++ model executables (.exe) for the PB, IoT, and ML models and/or Python3 model executables (.py) for ML modelling via the TensorFlow (version 2.12.0) open-source ML framework are placed on a platform store accessible to all users, who can pick the model executables of interest and place them in their own user-created folders in the users' personal accounts (Figure 6a,b). _DIMONA_'s 5-tier architecture is described in detail in the Supplementary Material. Tier I serves the front end, i.e., _DIMONA_'s GUI, accessible from user/client personal computers (PC), from where they can reach _DIMONA_ by using any browser, e.g., Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc. In the current _DIMONA_ pilot version, the internet connection from the user's browser to _DIMONA_ via ngrok internet tunnels is activated by the developer upon users' requests to generate a URL that is sent to them for working remotely. In its pilot capacity, _DIMONA_ can handle a number of users working simultaneously in their own personal accounts. When exploring sites and data sources, _DIMONA_ users do not need to have personal accounts; however, for all modelling activities, personal _DIMONA_ accounts are required. Figure 1: The main screen and schematic of the _DIMONA_ platform. Model users can navigate to sign up/log into their personal accounts or just explore the connected online sources without personal accounts. Figure 2: The general parameter screen (**a**) and the hydrology specifications screen (**b**) of the process-based (PB) model.