University of Waterloo and Indiana University, 2001-2003, with Peter Deadman
A fundamental step in LUCC research is the identification of drivers, or causal mechanisms, that influence landscape change. An area that has received widespread attention in LUCC research is the Amazon basin, due to the rapid rate of change and the region’s importance as a carbon sink and source of biodiversity.
Emilio Moran and Eduardo Brondizio of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University had been conducting field research along the trans-Amazon highway near Altimara, Brazil, since its inception in the early 1970’s. They hypothesized that much of what was driving land use changes (i.e. deforestation trends) on individual properties was based on household demographic characteristics. Our goal with the LUCITA project was to formalize research on colonist household farming practices and decision-making behaviours using an agent-based model to determine if the hypothesized conceptual model could produce overall patterns of land use change that agreed with those observed in remotely sensed images. The results of my master’s thesis (Robinson 2003) and coauthored paper (Deadman et al. 2004) illustrated that the use of simple heuristic decision-making strategies representing colonist household farming decisions were capable of producing land cover change trends that compared well with remotely sensed data from 1970-2000. We also determined that households did not make land-use decisions based on their length of time on the frontier, but simply on the basis of available household resources (i.e. labour and capital availability as a secondary result from changing household demographics and structure), the performance of previous crops, and the landscape characteristics of the farm parcel (e.g. soil and burn quality). Pre-existing lot characteristics were also found to influence household land use choices. Overall, our contribution suggested that the conceptual model of household demographics and structure changes could explain a portion of LUCC trends but that additional research focussing on lot effects, and information dissemination amongst farmers was needed.
The LUCITA project was a sub-component of a larger NSF biocomplexity in the environment program (SES00835) project titled "Biocomplexity in Linked Bioecological-Human Systems: Agent-Based Models of Land Use Decisions and Emergent Land Use Patterns in Forested Regions of the American Midwest and the Brazilian Amazon", whose principal investigator was Elinor Ostrom.
