Purpose of the Winter School
The overall aim of the winter school is that the participants will learn about the opportunities and challenges of agent-based modeling of social-ecological systems. Participants will engage intensely with a few comprehensive models, learn best practices in doing modeling in a team, and learn about the different modeling challenges across the various social and natural sciences.

Content of the Course
The winter school has two main components: lectures & project work. In addition, participants will present their own work in speed talks. Lectures will introduce participants to different concepts in the social and natural sciences critical for modeling social-ecological systems, such as human behavior, collective behavior, resilience, and land cover change. Students will also learn and use best practices to do modeling (reproducibility, model documentation, analysis of models) and how to work together in remote teams using Github. The participants will be introduced to various stylized agent-based models of actual research projects on social-ecological systems. Groups of participants will choose one of the models and adapt, expand, and analyze the model to better understand the impact of a particular assumptions on the overall outcome of the social-ecological system. The models are written in NetLogo. Therefore, participants must be able to write NetLogo programming code.

This is an advanced program, which is why we ask in the application information about your experience with NetLogo. This is not a program where you learn the basics of NetLogo.

We use Github during the Winter School and we will ask you to do a tutorial and some exercises in December to get sufficiently proficient with Github to use it effectively during the Winter School.

Schedule
Due to the virtual nature of this Winter School, it will be spread out over 2 weeks. The online interactive component is kept at four hours a day. The first week focuses on lectures, training in best practices and the start of group projects. The second week focuses on group projects and the presentation of the results