For forthcoming Aberdeen Nodal Office workshops please visit the 'Workshops' page of this site.
This page gives information on, and materials resulting from completed workshops organized and run by the Aberdeen GLP Nodal Office on Integration and Modelling.
2009
29th – 31st May 2009
Agent-Based Land Market Models Workshop
The Aberdeen Global Land Project office on integration and modelling and the US NSF-sponsored SLUCE 2 project co-sponsored a small, interactive workshop on agent-based land market models at the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. 15 international participants attended the two and a half day workshop to discuss a range of issues related to land market models.
The workshop was split into five sessions:
- Macro-scale drivers
- Institutional and policy environment
- Empirical implementation
- Special topics: auction mechanisms, developer behaviour, environmental issues
- Integrating urban & rural land markets
Presentations:
Session 1: Macro-scale driver
Moderators: Richard Aspinall, Darla Munroe, Tatiana Filatova
Session 2: Institutional and policy environment
Moderators: Moria Zellner, Gary Polhill, Nico Polman
Session 3: Empirical implementation
Moderators: Derek Robinson, Steve Shultz, Andrew Crooks
Session 4: Special topics: auction mechanism, developer behaviour, environmental issues
Moderators: Christoph Sahrbacher, Dan Brown, Tatiana Filatova
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Session 5: Integrating urban and rural land markets
Moderator Kiril Stanilov
Group Discussion
A workshop report is planned to be completed over summer, 2010, and will be published as part of the Web Book of Regional Science.
12th – 16th April 2009
Global Land Project Symposium on Agent-Based Modelling of Land Use Effects on Ecosystem Processes and Services
Hosted at the 2009 US-IALE Conference, Snowbird, Utah

Local scenery of Snowbird, Utah - picture courtesy of Gary Polhill
The symposium considered developments in coupled human-natural system modelling using agent-based simulation, from the perspective of land use effects on population dynamics and ecosystems processes and/or services at the landscape scale. Agent-based modelling has been applied for some time now to the study of land use and cover change by various researchers and to model ecological systems. However the use of ABM on coupled human-natural systems is growing but still relatively uncommon.
Presentations given at the symposium were:
An introduction to agent-based modelling of coupled human-natural systems
Gary Polhill and Dawn Parker
Evaluating the effects of land-use development policies on forest carbon storage: an integration of ABM, GIS and BIOME-BGC
Derek Robinson, Dan Brown and William Currie
Co-constructing an agent-based model to mediate a land use conflict between herders and foresters in northern Thailand
Pongchai Dumrongrojwatthana, Christophe Le Page, Nantana Gajaseni and Guy Trébuil
Parallel implementation of a spatially-explicit agent-based model for rangeland management
Wenwu Tang and David A Bennett
Capturing the complexity of land-use systems: a provenance-aware approach
David A Bennett and Wenwu Tang
Report from the Ecochange ABM project
Dave Murray-Rust
Investigating the interaction of land use/cover change and wildfire using agent-based modelling
James D A Millington, John Wainwright, Raul Romero-Calcerrada, George L W Perry and David Demeritt
Emission trading: an agent-based model to study the effects on the Scotland agriculture sector under different emission target constraints
Innocent Bakam, Guillaume Pajot and Robin Matthews
Using agent-based and metacommunity models to explore the effects agri-environment policy on species conservation
Alessandro Gimona, Gary Polhill and Ben Davies
Linking pastoral household decision making to ecosystem services using simulated scenarios
Randall B Boone
Lessons learned and prospects for agent-based modelling of land use effects on ecosystem processes and services
Richard Aspinall
Agent-based modelling of land use change and market-based instruments for water quality management
Scott Heckbert
Papers from the symposium will be published in a special issue of Land Use Science later in the year.