Cross-site comparison of land-use decision-making and its consequences across land systems with a generalized agent-based model.

ABSTRACT: Local changes in land use result from the decisions and actions of land-users within land systems, which are structured by local and global environmental, economic, political, and cultural contexts. Such cross-scale causation presents a major challenge for developing a general understanding of how local decision-making shapes land-use changes at the global scale. This paper implements a generalized agent-based model (ABM) as a virtual laboratory to explore how global and local processes influence the land-use and livelihood decisions of local land-users, operationalized as settlement-level agents, across the landscapes of six real-world test sites. Test sites were chosen in USA, Laos, and China to capture globally-significant variation in population density, market influence, and environme

SUBMITTER: Magliocca NR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3906050 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature