Why is this important? When I build my systems on computers I get to test my hypotheses, see if I am right, find errors, fix those errors and prove myself right. This is great for finding flaws with in the model, find problems with underlying assumptions...
Why I thought of this is I've been reading Edward O Wilson's book, 'letters to a young scientist', and in the prologue he mentions how he got funding for a website for all the insects. So I visited his website and it had been moved to the Smithsonian website. I guess at least it still exists but it's not as comprehensive as he made it out to be. Anyway that's why I thought of the models I proposed at this research institute.
I think this is a worthy attitude for all scientists, whether they are working with biology, physics, chemistry... of course many scientists are simulating their models, notably weather forecasters, and sometimes they get their models wrong, and sometimes they don't.
Even now we are seeing how deeply our planet goes in protecting us from ourselves, in all the damage we've done to the environment. Reading 'The ends of the world' by Peter Branner shows how many layers of protection there is, but most importantly, we have huge brains, we should be able to solve this problem, it's part of us achieving maturity as a civilization. but it's from our environmental models we've learned so much about our environment and as our models evolve as we learn, scientists build better and better models.