Dawn Cassandra Parker

Degrees

Ph.D. Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Davis, United States, 2000

B.A. Economics, Lewis and Clark College, United States, 1992

Contact information

Academic Honours

• Biennial Medal, International Environmental Modelling and Software Association, 2012 
• Fellow, Global Land Project, 2018 

Research interests

• Residential land markets 
• Modelling land-use/transportation/environment interactions 
• Planning sustainable cities 
• Agent-based modeling 
• Complexity theory 

Research grants/projects

• CIHR SMART Healthy Cities Training Platform
• Urban Growth and Change Research Group Findings and Analysis
• Waterloo Area Regional Model (WARM) Urban intensification vs. suburban flight
  • An integrated residential land-use and transportation model to evaluate residential land-market form and function.
• Partnership Development Grant
  • The SSHRC-funded Partnership Development Grant aims to unpack the causal relationships between light rail transit and core-area intensification in Waterloo Region
• Digging into Data MIRACLE project
  • MIRACLE (Mining relationships among variables in large datasets from complex systems) is a Digging into Data project that aims to build a cloud-based community platform for reproducible data analysis, visualization and management for ABM output data.
• SLUCE II project (Spatial Land Use Change and Ecological Effects)
  • Funded by: US National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural and Human Systems program
  • This is a collaborative, multi-institution, interdisciplinary research project involving six faculty members in the area of coupled human-natural systems. The project links agent-based modeling of human behaviours driving land use / land cover change (LULCC), preferences for vegetation cover and vegetation management, land market modeling, field work, remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling of landscape carbon balance in low-density human-dominated landscapes (suburban and exurban residential landscapes). My team will develop agent-based land market models, whose effects will be compared to the non-market land allocation mechanism used in the original SLUCE model.  
• And for something a little different that combines art and science, see the 2015 Bridges lecture "Dancing the math of complex systems":

Contact Dawn Parker for more information on research opportunities. See CV and websites for details of grants and publications. 

Graduate student supervision

Recent/key publications

• P. Meyfroidt, A. de Bremond…D.C. Parker… (+46 authors)“Ten facts about land systems for sustainability,” . (2022) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (119) 7. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109217118

• F. Jahanmiri and D.C. Parker.“An Overview of Fractal Geometry Applied to Urban Planning,”  Land (11) 4 https://doi.org/10.3390/land11040475  

• “An iterative process to construct an interdisciplinary ABM using MR POTATOHEAD: An application to Housing Market Models in touristic areas.” Eric Innocenti, Claudio Detotto, Corinne Idda, Dawn Cassandra Parker, Dominique Prunetti.  Ecological Complexity. 44. 

• “The effect of bicycle infrastructure on residential property values in a midsized Canadian city.” D. C. Parker Y. Huang D. Feng. 2020 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Meeting, Conference Date: 2020/11. 

• “Retail and Light Rail: Investigating the relationship between transit-induced intensification and retail gentrification in Waterloo Region.”  K. Webber D. C. Parker.  Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Meeting, Conference Date: 2020/11. 

• “Identifying heterogeneous preferences of homebuyers for a new Light-Rail Transit line.” Huang, Y., Parker, D. C., & Anglin, P. (2019).  5th Canadian PhD and Early Career Workshop in Environmental and Resource Economics (CREEA). Calgary, Canada, June3-4, 2019. 

• "The complexities of agent-based modelling output analysis”, J. S. Lee, T. Filatova ^∗, A. LigmannZilinska, B. Hassani-Mahmooei, F. Stonedahl, I. Lorscheid, A. A. Voinovv, J. G. Polhill, Z. Sun, and D. C. Parker (2015) Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 18(4).
• “Ecosystem services for connecting actorslessons from a symposium”, P. Opdam, C. Albert, C. Frst, A. Grt-Regamey, J. Kleemann, D. Parker, D. La Rosa, K. Schmidt, G. B Villamor, and A. Walz (2015) . Change and Adaptation in Socio-Ecological Systems, 2 (1).
• “’Standardized and transparent model description for agent-based models current state and ways ahead” Birgit Mller, S. B., Carsten M. Buchmann, Lus de Sousa, Gunnar Dressler, Jrgen Groeneveld, Christian J. Klassert, Quang Bao Le, James D.A. Millington, Henning Nolzen, Dawn C. Parker, J. Gary Polhill, Maja Schlter, Jule Schulze, Nina Schwarz, Zhanli Sun, Patrick Taillandier, and Hanna Weise (2014) Environmental Modelling and Software, 55, 156-163.
• “Integrating micro-scale timbering events and decision-making into landscape models using logistic and multilevel regression (2014) Donahoe^∗, S., D. C. Parker, B. Kronenfeld, and P. Ballint. Forest Science, 60(5), 962-972. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/forsci.13-061.
• “A Review of Urban Residential Choice Models Using Agent-based Modeling” Huang, Q^∗., D. C. Parker, T. Filatova^∗, and S. Sun^∗. (2014) Environment and Planning B, 41(4), 661 689. doi: 10.1068/b120043p. 
• “Market Impacts on Land-Use Change: An Agent-Based Experiment” (2014) S. Sun^∗, D. C. Parker, Q. Huang^∗, T. Filatova^∗, D. Robinson, R. Riolo, M. Hutchinson and D. Brown. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(3), 460-484.
• “An economic perspective on agent-based models of land-use and land-cover change” (2014) Parker, D. C. In Oxford Handbook of Land Economics, J. Duke and J. Wu, eds. Oxford University Press.
• “Effects of agent heterogeneity in the presence of a land-market: a systematic test in an agent-based laboratory” (2013) Q. Huang^∗, D. C. Parker, S. Sun^∗ and T. Filatova^∗. Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems 41, 188-203.
• “Spatial agent-based models for socio-ecological systems: challenges and prospects” (2013) T. Filatova^∗, P. Verburg, D. C. Parker and C. A. Stannard. Environmental Modelling and Software, 45, 1-7.

Courses taught

• PLAN 320/GEOG 319: Economic analyses for regional planning

• Plan 416: Modelling the city

• PLAN 474: Introduction to Agent-Based Modelling

• Plan 710: Research design

• PLAN 801/802: PhD Research Seminar 

• GEOG/LED/PLAN 603: Regional planning economic and investment

• GEMCC 652: Climate Change Planning