Abstract ID: 86

Modeling Land Use/Land Cover Change in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon: Linking Agent-based Models, Remote Sensing, and Household Surveys.

The Amazon basin is undergoing rapid land use/land cover (LULC) change involving complex processes which differ widely across the basin. Feedbacks between demographic processes and the environment create dynamic trajectories with emergent properties. The agricultural frontier in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA) is an area of particularly high biological and cultural diversity, experiencing change through endogenous and exogenous processes and provides an excellent laboratory to explore the complex socioeconomic and demographic processes that affect LULC. We explore LULC using a spatial simulation approach, agent-based models (ABMs), which incorporate the land use decision-making behavior at the household level. The present design of the ABM addresses household decision-making of agricultural colonists, who are the primary agents responsible for most of the LULC to date in the NEA. The ABM method draws on several theoretical paradigms, including multiphasic response theory and plot life cycle dynamics, and draws upon data and parameters estimated from a longitudinal survey of colonist farm households in 1990 & 1999 and a survey of colonist communities in 2000. Although preliminary, the model demonstrates the potentialities and synergisms of dynamic modeling and socioeconomic surveys. This research also illustrates the complexities of land use decision processes in a frontier environment and the potential consequences for the colonist farmers' welfare as well as that of the ecosystem.

Session:  LCLUC and Human Dimensions - Land-use/land-cover change models and scenarios at multiple scales for Amazonia.

Presentation Type:  Poster