On Thursday 15 July, Daniel Peart, Chelsea Hunter, Ian Hamilton, and Mark Moritz led a workshop on agent-based modeling using NetLogo for the 2021 Data Science for Women Summer Camp organized by the Translational Data Analytics Institute at the Ohio State University . In two-and-half hours, high-school students learned about complex systems and agent-based modeling, developed their own infectious diseases model in NetLogo, and ran experiments to see what happens when the disease characteristics change or agents move less.

Annalee Sekulić started volunteering for the Ancient Socioecological Systems in Oman project as a sophomore, and soon after she found herself traveling to the Arabian Peninsula to do research fieldwork with a global team of experts. Her task? Collecting hyrax midden as an unexpected way of tracking ancient pastoralist communities.

Our ASOM team just completed our first Big Game Theory summer camp at the PAST Foundation, where we used games and agent-based models to train students to find sustainable and equitable solutions to commons problems.

Mark Moritz, Ian Hamilton and colleagues published their paper Emergent Sustainability in Open Property Regimes in PNAS. In the paper, they compared eight cases with more or less open access to common-pool resources to develop a theoretical model that explains under what conditions one can expect the emergence of sustainability in open property regimes. Here is a link to the paper and here is the abstract:

Current theoretical models of the commons assert that common-pool resources can only be managed sustainably with clearly defined boundaries around both communities and the resources they use. In these theoretical models, open access inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. However, in many open-access systems, use of common-pool resources appears to be sustainable over the long term, i.e., current resource use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations. In this paper, we outline the conditions that support sustainable resource use in open property regimes. We use the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems to explain how processes within and couplings between human and natural systems can lead to the emergence of efficient, equitable and sustainable resource use. We illustrate these dynamics in eight case studies of different social-ecological systems including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging. Our theoretical framework identifies eight conditions that are critical for the emergence of sustainable use of common-pool resources in open property regimes. In addition, we explain how changes in boundary conditions may push open property regimes either to common property regimes or a tragedy of the commons. Our theoretical model of emergent sustainability helps to understand the diversity and dynamics of property regimes across a wide range of social-ecological systems and explains the enigma of open access without a tragedy. We recommend that policy interventions in such self-organizing systems should focus on managing the conditions that are critical for the emergence and persistence of sustainability.

Our research team recently visited the Innovation Lab at the PAST Foundation to run a workshop for middle-school students on systems thinking using NetLogo agent-based modeling software. We experimented with the flocking, wolf-sheep, and traffic models before we moved on to a zombie model that Daniel Peart designed for the workshop. The plan is to use the workshops with the middle-school students to develop modules for a half-day summer camp The Big Game Theory at the PAST Foundation.

Mark Moritz and Lawrence Ball visited the research team in Dhofar and toured the study area with Hassan Al Mahri, October 16 – 20, 2018.

Mark Moritz and Ian Hamilton just wrapped up a Research Team Seminar on Property Regimes as Complex Adaptive Systems at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) to discuss what explains the sustainability of open property regimes. Here is the abstract. The goal of the research team seminar is to develop a theoretical model of property regimes as complex adaptive systems. The project builds on a NSF-funded project that showed how pastoralists’ management of common-pool grazing resources works as a self-organizing complex adaptive system in which individual movement decisions results in an ideal free distribution of cattle over available grazing resources in the Logone Floodplain of Cameroon. Multiple lines of evidence from ethnographic and spatial analyses, multi-agent simulations, and comparative studies have shown that this system is efficient, equitable, and resilient. There are indications that other social-ecological systems, notably fisheries and foraging societies, also have property regimes that work as complex adaptive systems. The research team seminar will bring together scholars of different social-ecological systems to explore the similarities and differences across these cases and develop a general theoretical model that helps us understand what makes them more or less resilient.