Monday, April 09, 2018

Predicting Rice Cropping Patterns around Poyang Lake, China using a Cellular Automata Model

http://mason.gmu.edu/~qtian2/QingTianSummary.html
Normally, on this blog, the focus is on agent-based modeling and GIS. However, I am not agnostic to other modeling approaches especially cellular automata (CA) modeling (which I have written about in the past).  To this end, Rui Zhang, Qing Tian, Luguang Jiang, Shuhua Qi, Ruixin Yang and myself recently had a paper published in Land Use Policy entitled: "Projecting Cropping Patterns around Poyang Lake and Prioritizing Areas for Policy Intervention to Promote Rice: A Cellular Automata Model" In the paper we explore current land use patterns in the Poyang Lake Region (PLR) of China. Specifically, we focus on current rice production in the region and what this might look like in the future (especially the impact of farmland consolidation) by using an CA model (built on the DINAMICA EGO platform). Below you can read the abstract to our paper, along with some figures, outlining our study area, the model design and development, along with observed current day and predicted rice cropping patterns around Poyang Lake. Finally at the bottom of the post I provide the full reference and a link to the paper.

Abstract:
Rural households’ cropping choices are increasingly influenced by nonfarm activities across the developing world, raising serious concerns about food security locally and globally. In China, rapid urbanization has led to agricultural decline in some regions. To stimulate agriculture, the Chinese government has recently increased its effort in farmland consolidation by providing special support to large farms in an attempt to address land-use inefficiency associated with small farming operations in rural China. Focusing on the Poyang Lake Region (PLR), we develop a Cellular Automata (CA) model to explore future agricultural land use and examine the impact of farmland consolidation. PLR is an important rice production base in Jiangxi Province and China. In PLR rice can be grown once a year on a plot, called one-season rice, or twice a year on the same plot, called two-season rice. Our CA model simulates the transition between one-season and two-season rice. Emphasizing distributional differences in the region, we use the modeling results to identify five areas where rice cultivation is (i) relatively stable for one-season rice, (ii) more likely to be one-season rice, (iii) of equal probability for either type, (iv) more likely to be two-season rice, and (v) relatively stable for two-season rice. We then explore the characteristics of these areas in terms of biophysical and geographical environments to provide further insights into how the government may prioritize areas for interventions to effectively promote food production and environmental sustainability. The analysis also indicates a positive effect of farmland consolidation on promoting rice production.

Keywords: Agricultural Land Use; Cellular Automata; Food Security; Environmental Sustainability; Farmland Consolidation; China.
Poyang Lake Region. The left map shows its location in China. Rice cropping patterns shown on the right map were interpreted from Landsat images in 2013.
Model design and development

Rice cropping patterns around Poyang Lake. The map on the left is observed land use in 2013 and on the right prediction for 2033.

Full Reference:
Zhang, R., Tian, Q., Jiang, L., Crooks, A.T., Qi, S. and Yang, R. (2018), Projecting Cropping Patterns around Poyang Lake and Prioritizing Areas for Policy Intervention to Promote Rice: A Cellular Automata Model, Land Use Policy, 74: 248-260. (pdf)
As always, any thoughts or comments are most welcome.

Saturday, April 07, 2018

Innovations in Urban Analytics @ the AAG

Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics Sessions

As part of the Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research we have organized 5 sessions around Innovations in Urban Analytics. These sessions will take place on Thursday 12th of April from 8am to 7pm in the Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor.

Description
New forms of data about people and cities, often termed ‘Big’, are fostering research that is disrupting many traditional fields. This is true in geography, and especially in those more technical branches of the discipline such as computational geography / geocomputation, spatial analytics and statistics, geographical data science, etc. These new forms of micro-level data have lead to new methodological approaches in order to better understand how urban systems behave. Increasingly, these approaches and data are being used to ask questions about how cities can be made more sustainable and efficient in the future.

These sessions will bring together the latest research in urban analytics. In particular the papers will engage in the following domains:
  • Agent-based modelling (ABM) and individual-based modelling;
  • Machine learning for urban analytics;
  • Innovations in consumer data analytics for understanding urban systems;
  • Real-time model calibration and data assimilation;
  • Spatio-temporal data analysis;
  • New data, case studies, demonstrators, and tools for the study of urban systems;
  • Complex systems analysis;
  • Geographic data mining and visualisation;
  • Frequentist and Bayesian approaches to modelling cities.


Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics I - Agent-Based Modelling and Machine Learning

Time: 8:00 AM
Location: Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor

Chair: Nick Malleson.

Andrew Crooks, Annetta Burger, Xiaoyi Yuan and William Kennedy:
Title: The Generation and Application of Large Scale Synthetic Populations for Disease Outbreaks and Disasters.
Achilleas Psyllidis and Hendra Hadhil Choiri:
Title: A Convolutional Neural Network-based Model for Predicting the Perceived Attractiveness of Urban Places
Jonathan Reades, Jordan de Souza and Elizabeth Sklar:
Title: Predicting Neighbourhood Change in London with Random Forests  
Nick Malleson, Tomas CrolsJonathan Ward and Andrew Evans:
Title: Forecasting Short-Term Urban Dynamics: Data Assimilation for Agent-Based Modelling
Tomas Crols and Nick Malleson:
Title: Calibrating an Agent-Based Model of the Ambient Population using Big Data  

Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics II - Transport and Accessibility 


Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor

Chair: Andrew Crooks

Ed Manley:
Title: Analysing Cities through Cognitive Models of Geographic Space.
Alison Heppenstall, Yuanxuan Yang and Alexis Comber:
Title: Who, why and when? Using smart card and social media data to reveal flows through urban spaces. 
Kerry Nice, Jason Thompson, Jasper Wijnands, Gideon Aschwanden and Mark Stevenson:
Title: The Paris end of town? Urban typology through machine learning.
Henrikki Tenkanen, Olle JärvMaria Salonen, Rein Ahas and  Tuuli Toivonen:
Title: Dynamic cities: Spatial accessibility as a function of time.
Thomas Redfern, Nicolas MallesonGillian Harrison, Frances Hodgson, Alexis Comber and Susan Grant-Muller:
Title: Monitoring, modelling and understanding the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of air pollution exposure, transport policies, and health burdens. 

Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics III - Data Synergies and Emerging Insights


Time: 1:20 PM
Location: Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor

Chair: Alison Heppenstall

Tuuli Toivonen, Henrikki Tenkanen, Vuokko HeikinheimoOlle Järv and Tuomo Hiippala:
Title: Social media content for understanding the spatial patterns of urban leisure time 
Emmanouil Tranos:
Title: Doing internet archaeology to reveal the evolution of the digital economy in the UK.
Daniel Arribas-Bel:
Title: "Nowcasting" house prices at high spatiotemporal resolution.
Nik Lomax and Andrew Smith:
Title: High resolution demographic projections for infrastructure planning.

Discussant: Alison Heppenstall


Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics IV


Time: 3:20 PM
Location: Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor

Chair: Ed Manley.

Boyana Buyuklieva and Adam Dennett:
Title: Making Metrics Meaningful: A Discussion of Implementation and Reproducibility Using Measures of Migration
Marina Toger, Ian Shuttleworth and John Östh:
Title: How average is average? Temporal patterns and variability in mobile phone data
Alec Davies, Mark Green and Alex Singleton
Title: Using new forms of data to investigate self-medication.
Ellen Talbot:
Title: Estimating Energy Consumption Through Smart Meter and Socio-demographic Datasets.
Discussant Ed Manley.


Symposium on New Horizons in Human Dynamics Research: Innovations in Urban Analytics V: Panel Session

Time: 5:20 PM
Location: Bayside A, Sheraton, 4th Floor

New forms of data about people and cities, often termed ‘Big’, are fostering research that is disrupting many traditional fields. This is true in geography, and especially in those more technical branches of the discipline such as computational geography / geocomputation, spatial analytics and statistics, geographical data science, etc. These new forms of micro-level data have lead to new methodological approaches in order to better understand how urban systems behave. Increasingly, these approaches and data are being used to ask questions about how cities can be made more sustainable and efficient in the future.

This panel session concludes the 'Innovations in Urban Analytics' paper theme.

Panelists:
Alex Singleton, Andrew Crooks, Boyana Buyuklieva, Tuuli Toivonen and Moira Zellner


Session Sponsors:
Organizers: