Displaying 10 of 59 results for "Roland Ortt" clear search
Modeling land use change from smallholder agricultural intensification
Agricultural expansion in the rural tropics brings much needed economic and social development in developing countries. On the other hand, agricultural development can result in the clearing of biologically-diverse and carbon-rich forests. To achieve both development and conservation objectives, many government policies and initiatives support agricultural intensification, especially in smallholdings, as a way to increase crop production without expanding farmlands. However, little is understood regarding how different smallholders might respond to such investments for yield intensification. It is also unclear what factors might influence a smallholder’s land-use decision making process. In this proposed research, I will use a bottom-up approach to evaluate whether investments in yield intensification for smallholder farmers would really translate to sustainable land use in Indonesia. I will do so by combining socioeconomic and GIS data in an agent-based model (Land-Use Dynamic Simulator multi-agent simulation model). The outputs of my research will provide decision makers with new and contextualized information to assist them in designing agricultural policies to suit varying socioeconomic, geographic and environmental contexts.
Sudhira’s research has been primarily on urban land-use and land cover change studies exploring their consequences on environmental sustainability and understanding their inter-relationship with transportation. His broader research addresses the evolution and growth of towns and cities invoking complexity sciences, understanding planning practices and studying the effect of varied governance structures.
The goal of my research program is to improve our understanding about highly integrated natural and human processes. Within the context of Land-System Science, I seek to understand how natural and human systems interact through feedback mechanisms and affect land management choices among humans and ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage) and biophysical processes (e.g., erosion) in natural systems. One component of this program involves finding novel methods for data collection (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be used to calibrate and validate models of natural systems at the resolution of decision makers. Another component of this program involves the design and construction of agent-based models to formalize our understanding of human decisions and their interaction with their environment in computer code. The most exciting, and remaining part, is coupling these two components together so that we may not only quantify the impact of representing their coupling, but more importantly to assess the impacts of changing climate, technology, and policy on human well-being, patterns of land use and land management, and ecological and biophysical aspects of our environment.
To achieve this overarching goal, my students and I conduct fieldwork that involves the use of state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combination with ground-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment, RTK global positioning system (GPS) receivers, weather and soil sensors, and a host of different types of manual measurements. We bring these data together to make methodological advancements and benchmark novel equipment to justify its use in the calibration and validation of models of natural and human processes. By conducting fieldwork at high spatial resolutions (e.g., parcel level) we are able to couple our representation of natural system processes at the scale at which human actors make decisions and improve our understanding about how they react to changes and affect our environment.
land use; land management; agricultural systems; ecosystem function; carbon; remote sensing; field measurements; unmanned aerial vehicle; human decision-making; erosion, hydrological, and agent-based modelling
Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)
Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)
M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)
B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)
Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni
Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
University of Brescia, Italy
Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi
The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
Instructors: Bill Rand
Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
National Defense University, P. R. China
Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng
Routine dynamics, Agent-based modeling, Computational social/organization science, Industrial systems engineering, etc.
I am interested in the dynamics of cultural transmission, especially in diffusion of religious innovations (concepts and practices) across a population. In my dissertation, I am targeting this issue while studying and modelling the development of Christian meal practices in the first four centuries CE across the Roman Mediterranean.
Assistant Proffesor at Faculty of Human Geography, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
I study human dimensions of natural resource management and resource use by under-represented populations—often in developing nations—to enhance our understanding of conflicts involving land use, natural resources, and conservation from an interdisciplinary, systematic lens. My research spans subjects such as common pool resource management and policy, decentralization, and land use/land cover change drivers and trends relating to population rise and environmental change.
Eric Kameni holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science option modeling and application from the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, after a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in Application Development and a Diploma in Master’s degree with Thesis in Computer Science on “modeling the diffusion of trust in social networks” at the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon. My doctoral thesis focused on developing a model-based development approach for designing ICT-based solutions to solve environmental problems (Natural Model based Design in Context (NMDC)).
The particular focus of the research is the development of a spatial and Agent-Based Model to capture the motivations underlying the decision making of the various actors towards the investments in the quality of land and institutions, or other aspects of land use change. Inductive models (GIS and statistical based) can extrapolate existing land use patterns in time but cannot include actors decisions, learning and responses to new phenomena, e.g. new crops or soil conservation techniques. Therefore, more deductive (‘theory-driven’) approaches need to be used to complement the inductive (‘data-driven’) methods for a full grip on transition processes. Agent-Based Modeling is suitable for this work, in view of the number and types of actors (farmer, sedentary and transhumant herders, gender, ethnicity, wealth, local and supra-local) involved in land use and management. NetLogo framework could be use to facilitate modeling because it portray some desirable characteristics (agent based and spatially explicit). The model develop should provide social and anthropological insights in how farmers work and learn.
I studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at Istanbul Technical University. During my undergraduate studies I became interested in the field of Ecology and Evolution and did internships on animal behaviour in Switzerland and Ireland. I then went on to pursue a 2-year research Master’s in Evolutionary Biology (MEME) funded by the European Union. I worked on projects using computer simulations to investigate evolution of social complexity and human cooperation. I also did behavioural economics experiments on how children learn social norms by copying others. After my Master’s, I pursued my dream of doing fieldwork and investigating human societies. I did my PhD at UCL, researching cultural evolution and behavioural adaptations in Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo. During my PhD, I was part of an inter-disciplinary Hunter-Gatherer Resilience team funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I obtained a postdoctoral research fellowship from British Academy after my PhD. I am currently working as a British Academy research fellow and lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Medicine at UCL.
Displaying 10 of 59 results for "Roland Ortt" clear search