Speaker:
Akiko Satake,
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
Princeton University

Title: Coupled ecological and social dynamics in a forested landscape: forward- and backward-looking decisions of landowners

Abstract:

We present a Markov chain model for land-use dynamics in a forested landscape. This model emphasizes the importance of coupling socioeconomic and ecological processes underlying landscape change. We assume a forest is composed of a number of land parcels that are individually managed. Each parcel is in one of a finite list of land-use states. The state transition of each parcel is described by a Markov chain that incorporates forest regeneration and landowners' decisions about deforestation. The landowner tends to choose the land-use state that produces a large expected utility. We consider two different type of decisions, forward- and backward-looking decisions. Forward looking landowners estimate the expected discounted utility of each land-use option by calculating the sum of the current and the future utilities of the land parcel. On the contrary, backward-looking landowners learn utility values of different land-use states from their experiences. We showed that in forward-looking decision, myopic landowners who focused on short-term benefits from land-conversion tends to push the entire landscape toward a low profitable state. In backward-looking decisions, we observed synchronized deforestation among different landowners, that resulted in a resource shortage in the society. The synchronized deforestation was likely to occur when landowners employed a stochastic decision and a short-term memory about past experiences. These results imply that a long-term management perspective and learning /remembering past experiences are important to prevent overexploitation of forest resources and degradation of social welfare.