Abstract ID: 171

Agent-Based Models of Deforestation in the Amazon

The Amazon is the largest remaining contiguous tropical forest in the world, a reservoir of cultural and biological diversity, and a critical component in global climate change studies. Unfortunately, it also has the world&rsquos highest deforestation rate. Moreover, fragmentation may also be important to the integrity of the forest, as landscape ecologists have long theorized different landscape patterns may affect ecological processes differently. To understand the drivers and causes of deforestation, many theories have been forwarded, linking specific deforestation patterns with particular agents. There are three dominant agents of deforestation in the Amazon. Two have been previously researched, the colonist farmers who produce the fish-bone pattern of deforestation, and loggers who produce the corridor or dendritic pattern. Theories for their economic behavior resulting in their spatial expressions of deforestation have been proposed. The third agent has been less studied, large-scale agricultural concerns that produce the geometric or rectilinear pattern of deforestation, with potentially the greatest impacts due to the size and number of their holdings. Additional theories for these agents will likewise be forwarded. As methodology to test the validity of these theories, spatially-explicit, agent-based models of deforestation hypothesized on the agents&rsquo economic utility will be developed. The premise is that the aggregate spatial expressions of the deforestation activities of utility maximizing, interacting agents will replicate their corresponding patterns on stylized landscapes. Cooperative road building between neighbors forms the basis for advancing the deforestation frontier in the colonists&rsquo case. A search for the optimum route and extraction policy from multiple locations that minimize costs is the basis in the loggers&rsquo case, whose extraction routes define the probable paths for opportunistic, informal settlers. Lastly, a choice between mutually-exclusive land uses that maximizes returns involving land rents, transportation and operating costs, and edge-effect losses between land-uses is the basis for the large-scale agriculturists.

Session:  LCLUC and Human Dimensions - Social-economic drivers of land-use and land-cover change.

Presentation Type:  Poster