Akiko Satake
(Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University)

05/11/08, 15:30 at Room 3631 (6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)

We developed an agent-based model for deforestation to explore how agents make decisions associated with deforestation and how these decisions come to influence macro patterns of land-use over time. We assumed that a forest is composed of many land parcels arranged in a regular square lattice in a one-dimensional space. Each parcel is in either a forested or a deforested state. When utilities of forested and deforested states are given, landowners make decision to increase the net present value of their land. The net present value of the land is the weighting average of the current utility and the utility to be received in a future. By analyzing equilibrium patterns, we showed that when landowners largely discount the future, the deforestation rate is very high and individual landowners tend to push the entire forest towards a deforested state. We gave the exact condition for deforestation when landowners employed heuristic decision process. Based on the result, we identify key factors that are important to facilitate successful forest management.

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