Fall Semester 2000
4:00-5:30 p.m. Monday, November 27,
2000
Jane Southworth,
Post-Doctoral Fellow, SPEA/CIPEC,
"Midwestern crop growth under conditions of climatic
change - Implications and Adaptations for maize, soybeans, and
wheat."
Abstract
Starting with the assumption of global climate change by 2050
this research concentrates on assessing how agriculture in the
Upper Midwest of the US will adapt to climate change. In this
study, climate data for current conditions (VEMAP data set) and
for two future scenarios (HADCM2 model), in the form of monthly
and daily values, were used to evaluate crop growth using DSSAT
version 3.5, for 2050-59. These same climate data were then
manipulated by changing their standard deviations to produce
increased or decreased climate variability scenarios. Results
were evaluated across 10 different locations, for maize, soybeans
and wheat, and for seven climate scenarios (control or current
conditions, mean changes, variance changes, mean and variance
changes). Maize yields decreased across the southern study area
and increased across northern areas. For wheat and soybeans
yields generally increase across all states, with mean yield
increases of >50% across northern states. Results are crop specific
with major differences between C3 (soybean and wheat) and C4
(maize) crops. Soybeans and wheat yields show a mean CO2 fertilization
effect >20%, with maize yields having only a limited effect
(<5%). In addition, maize responds most negatively to high temperatures
(>35 °C) producing a significant north-south divide across the
study area relating to thermal gradients. Soybeans respond most
negatively to the more extreme climate warming scenarios (HadCM2-GHG)
but wheat responds most negatively to the doubled variability
analyses. Year to year variability in yields increase significantly
under doubled variability analyses with increased crop failures
under these scenarios, with most failures under the HadCM2-GHG
doubled variability analyses. Such results highlight the spatial
variability, species variability, and alternative adaptation
strategies. Economic implications of such changes at the farm
level are also discussed.
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4:00-5:30 p.m. Monday, November 20,
2000
Harini Nagendra, Post-Doctoral Fellow, CIPEC,
"Incorporating landscape transformation into local conservation
prioritization: A case study in the Western Ghats, India."
Abstract
In resource-rich and heterogeneous tropical areas such as
cover large parts of India, patterns of ecosystem and landscape
change are often locality-specific. Conservation strategies
for such regions are best formulated at local scales. Consideration
of species-based and ecosystem-based approaches along with an
understanding of local landscape dynamics enables the design
of more comprehensive strategies for assessing conservation
priorities. This paper presents a method for conservation prioritization,
which integrates information on ecosystem function and services
with landscape dynamics.
The methodology is illustrated through a case study of a tropical,
species-rich landscape in southern India, that is undergoing
fairly rapid transformation. Vegetation types or ecosystems
within the landscape are based on the ecosystem services they
might provide: number of endemic species harbored, species richness,
contribution to carbon uptake, economic value of produce per
hectare and contribution to soil renewal. For a vegetation type,
the weighted average of these ranks indicates its net conservation
value. Weights thus provide a means of ascribing differential
importance to an ecosystem service. Information on landscape
change is also summarized by a matrix depicting the likelihood
of transformations between vegetation types present in the landscape,
projected five years into the future.
For each transformation between two vegetation types, information
on ecosystem service and dynamics is then integrated. Implications
from the perspective of conservation are assessed as the product
of transformation probability and the resultant gain/loss in
conservation value. Strongly positive transformations are likely
to result in positive impacts on conservation value, and occur
without any additional conservation effort. Strongly negative
transformations are likely to occur and have a strong negative
impact on conservation value. Maximum conservation effort may
be directed at halting or reversing these.
Can this approach be adopted for CIPEC-IFRI linkages? A discussion
of possibilities follows.
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4:00-5:30 p.m. Monday, November 13,
2000
Gerald Nelson,
Associate Professor
Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
"Spatial Econometric Analysis of Land
Use in Developing Countries: An Example from the Darien, Panama."
Abstract
Human transformation of terrestrial ecosystems is central to
global environmental change. The change process is driven by
millions of individual decision-makers, many in developing countries,
who determine the use of land under their control. The land
use decision is fundamentally a local one but can be changed
by public policy. It depends on location-specific natural resources
such as climate and land quality, and location-specific socioeconomic
variables such as prices and infrastructure availability. In
developing countries, analysis of land use change is especially
constrained by lack of data.
This presentation highlights new economic modeling approaches
that involve spatial data. An empirical analysis of the consequences
of infrastructure development (such as road construction) and
policy changes (such as enhanced property rights) funded by
a loan from the Interamerican Development Bank in Darien, Panama
will be presented. The region has unique cultural and environmental
endowments. The goal of the research was to predict land use
changes that would occur after the road is resurfaced and other
project interventions completed. We use the basic von Thunen
insights on the role of location and transportation costs to
develop a spatial econometric model of land use as a function
of geophysical and socioeconomic variables and estimate it using
spatial data for the province. The results of this model are
used to predict spatially explicit effects of road resurfacing
on economic activities. We use spatial analysis techniques to
simulate how the project will affect land use at every location
in the province.
Monday, October 30, 2000
Eduardo
S. Brondizio, Department
of Anthropology, Indiana
University. "A Field-Image Data Base Strategy Using
the LBA Project Example: Can we use it for CIPEC?"
Abstract
As part of the project "Human and physical dimensions
of land use change in Amazonia: Secondary succession and Landscape
structure" ACT, NIGEC, ISU (Indiana State University),
and INPE (Brazilian National Institute for Space Research) have
been working together for the past 2 years within the context
of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia
(LBA), a long-term program aiming to understand the interactions
between human activities and the biophysical environment in
Amazonia. Bringing together existing and new data from 7 research
sites in the region was the first major challenge to address
in order to allow us to examine our set of research questions.
We concentrate on three main sets of questions: (1) modeling
vegetation parameters and spectral data; (2) look at land use
drivers across a range of representative human communities;
(3) compare the impact of different land use systems on the
structure and configuration landscapes. To address this challenge
we developed a Oracle-based database that integrates vegetation
inventories, land use history, and remote sensing data allowing
extraction and modeling of vegetation-spectral data in a variety
of ways. In parallel--but with a integrative concern, a database
on economic species of secondary succession areas, and a database
on property level socio-demographic and land use data have been
developed. This presentation gives an introduction to the structure
of these databases and the potential for use in other CIPEC
research sites.
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Monday, October 23, 2000
Joshua Epstein, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies,
Brookings Institution, Washington
D.C. "Modeling Civil Violence: An Agent-Based Computational
Approach."
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Monday, September 18, 2000
Dawn Parker, Post-Doctoral Fellow,
CIPEC.
"An Agent-Based Manifesto for Land Cover Modeling."
Abstract
"In my presentation, I will outline my research interests
in three interlinked areas: environmental economics, complex
social and biological systems, and GIS based models of
land cover change. I will discuss the advantages of agent-based
modeling as a tool which links these three research areas, drawing
on my thesis research as an illustrative example. My thesis
research focused on a very specific problem in environmental
economics -- negative spillovers between neighboring land users
that exhibit distance dependence, with the magnitude of negative
impacts decreasing as distance from the damaging land use increases.
The landscape impacts of these "edge-effect externalities",
in parallel with ecological edge effects, imply that different
patterns of land use will produce different levels of total
landscape productivity. This phenomenon, mathematically
titled a "nonconvexity", implies that a variety
of landscape patterns are possible in equilibrium, in contrast
to most standard economic models. Further, the spatial
heterogeneity of edge-effect externalities implies a complex
web of spatial interdependencies in the decisions of individual
land owners. These characteristics -- nonconvexities and
interdependencies -- are key features of complex dynamic systems.
They also imply that a traditional analytic model of this
economic system would be intractable.
As an alternative to traditional economic modeling, I constructed
an agent-based cellular automaton model of land owner decision
making to analyze spatial patterns of economic activity under
edge-effect externalities. In these models, individually
programmed "agents" make decisions based on a user
specified internal decision calculus and information on their
local environment. This decentralized decision making
environment facilitates models which reflect a much higher degree
of heterogeneity and interdependencies than traditional analytical
models. Further, cellular automaton models produce explicit
predictions related to landscape pattern, facilitating
testing of hypotheses related to landscape pattern using
real-world GIS data. For my thesis, I used this general
approach to motivate theoretical differences between organic
and conventional farms and empirically demonstrate these differences
through analysis of GIS generated landscape statistics."
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Monday, September 25, 2000
Darla Munroe, Post-Doctoral Fellow,
CIPEC.
"The Use of Econometric and Spatial Econometric Techniques
in Modeling Land Use/Land Cover Change."
Abstract
"There exists a small but growing literature for modeling
land use/land cover changes using econometric techniques. Any
model that attempts to explain land use changes must not only
consider socioeconomic variations over time, but incorporate
relevant geophysical, infrastructural and policy variation as
well. In addition, spatial relationships, both absolute and
relative, cannot be ignored. This talk will include a survey
of a few econometric models of land use change, both spatially
explicit and non-spatial in nature. Then, a methodology for
econometric models of land use change in Indiana will be introduced.
Because of the highly complex nature of variations over space
and time, one model cannot possibly explain all observed changes
in land use. Nevertheless, such attempts provide an important
starting point for identifying and quantifying the relationships
among the above variables and land use change in Indiana. "
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Last Updated: May 11, 2005
Comments: cipec@indiana.edu
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2005, The Trustees of Indiana
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