I am interested in modeling socio-ecological systems. I am currently working on the implementation of a seed-exchange model for understanding the role of some kinship patterns (locality and seed heritage rules) in agrobiodiversity.

I study human dimensions of natural resource management and resource use by under-represented populations—often in developing nations—to enhance our understanding of conflicts involving land use, natural resources, and conservation from an interdisciplinary, systematic lens. My research spans subjects such as common pool resource management and policy, decentralization, and land use/land cover change drivers and trends relating to population rise and environmental change.

I am an anthropological archaeologist with broad interests in hunter-gatherers, lithic technology, human evolution, and complex systems theory. I am particularly interested in understanding processes of long term social, evolutionary, and adaptational change among hunter-gatherers, specifically by using approaches that combine archaeological data, ethnographic data, and computational modeling.

My interests center around long-term human ecology and landscape dynamics with ongoing projects in the Mediterranean (late Pleistocene through mid-Holocene) and recent work in the American Southwest (Holocene-Archaic). I’ve done fieldwork in Spain, Bosnia, and various locales in North America and have expertise in hunter/gatherer and early farming societies, geoarchaeology, lithic technology, and evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on human/environmental interaction, landscape dynamics, and techno-economic change.

Quantitative methods are critical to archaeological research, and socioecological sciences in general. They are an important focus of my research, especially emphasizing dynamic modeling, spatial technologies (including GIS and remote sensing), statistical analysis, and visualization. I am a member of the open source GRASS GIS international development team that is making cutting edge spatial technologies available to researchers and students around the world.

Social change with COVID-19

Conducts urban planning and policy research on energy efficiency, environmental, and infrastructure decision making.

My interests are to explore aspects of sustainability, resilience, and adaptive management in social-ecological systems using agent-based models and other simulation models.

The particular focus of the research is the development of a spatial and Agent-Based Model to capture the motivations underlying the decision making of the various actors towards the investments in the quality of land and institutions, or other aspects of land use change. Inductive models (GIS and statistical based) can extrapolate existing land use patterns in time but cannot include actors decisions, learning and responses to new phenomena, e.g. new crops or soil conservation techniques. Therefore, more deductive (‘theory-driven’) approaches need to be used to complement the inductive (‘data-driven’) methods for a full grip on transition processes. Agent-Based Modeling is suitable for this work, in view of the number and types of actors (farmer, sedentary and transhumant herders, gender, ethnicity, wealth, local and supra-local) involved in land use and management. NetLogo framework could be use to facilitate modeling because it portray some desirable characteristics (agent based and spatially explicit). The model develop should provide social and anthropological insights in how farmers work and learn.