I have a background in social science and training in modeling coupled human and natural systems, and apply both to advance our understanding of how interactions among cognitive, behavioral, social, and demographic processes influence human adaptation to climate change.
agent-based modeling, cognition
B.S. in Fish and Wildlife from Michigan State University in 1996. M.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Maine - Orono in 2001. Employed by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources since 2003, first as a field biologist (2003-2008), then statewide endangered species coordinator (2008-2012), and currently as the statewide (climate) adaptation program lead (2012-present). Also currently a graduate student in the Boone and Crockett Quantitative Wildlife Center at Michigan State University (2015-present). Father, gardener, hiker, and amateur myxomycologist.
Human-wildlife social-ecological systems, resilience and learning in complex adaptive systems, climate change, disturbance ecology, and historical ecology
I am a modeler scientist at CIRAD. As member of the Green Research Unit, I contribute to promote the Companion Modeling approach (http://www.commod.org). Through the development of CORMAS, a Framework for Agent-Based Models (http://cormas.cirad.fr), I have been focusing on the development and the use of multi-agent simulations for renewable resource management issues. I have been based several years in Brazil, at the University of Brasilia and at the PUC-Rio University, until 2014. I developed models related to environmental management, such as breeding adaptation to drought in the Uruguay or as breeding and deforestation in the Amazon. I am currently based in Costa Rica, firstly at the University of Costa Rica working on adaptation of agriculture and livestock to Climate Changes, and now at CATIE, working on coffe rust.
Participatory modeling, including collective design of model and interactive simulation
I am currently working as a researcher engineer at the Trustworthy, Intelligent, Self-organizing Information Systems Laboratory (LICIA) of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) since January 2017, where I carry out research in distributed problem solving in general.
I am interested in working on open interdisciplinary problems in domains like multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, self-organization and self-adaptation, biological systems, distributed clock synchronization and behavioural economics.
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.
Integrating social and natural science to study coupled human-natural systems, and particularly the interactions of society with the physical environment under conditions of environmental stress.
Water scarcity generated by climate change and mismanagement, affects individual at microlevel and the society and the system at a more general level. The research focuses on irrigation system and their robustness and adaptation capacity to uncertainty. In particular it investigates the evolution of farmers interactions and the effectiveness of policies by means of dynamic game theory and incorporate the results into an Agent Based Model to explore farmers emergent behaviors and the role of an agency in defining policies. Early knowledge of individual decision makers could help the agency to design more acceptable solutions.
Dr. Lilian Alessa, University of Idaho President’s Professor of Resilient Landscapes in the Landscape Architecture program, is also Co-Director of the University of Idaho Center for Resilient Communities. She conducts extensive research on human adaptation to environmental change through resilient design at landscape scales. Much of her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, including projects awarded the Arctic Observing Network, Intersections of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems programs. Canadian-born and raised, Alessa received her degrees from the University of British Columbia. She also uses her expertise in social-ecological and technological systems science to develop ways to improve domestic resource security for community well-being, particularly through the incorporation of place-based knowledge. Her work through the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence, the Arctic Domain Awareness Center, involves developing social-technological methods to monitor and respond to critical environmental changes. Lil is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education and is on the Science, Technology and Education Advisory Committee for the National Ecological Observing Network (NEON). Professor Alessa also teaches a university landscape architecture capstone course: Resilient Landscapes with Professor Andrew Kliskey. Professor Alessa’s collaborative grant activity with Professor Andrew Kliskey, since coming to the university in 2013, exceeds 7 million USD to date. She has authored over a 100 publications and reports and has led the development of 2 federal climate resilience toolbox assessments, the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) and the Arctic Adaptation Exchange Portal (AAEP).
I discovered at the same time Agent-Based Modeling method and Companion Modelling approach during my master degrees (engeenering and artificial intelligence and decision) internship at CIRAD in 2005 and 2006 where I had the opportunity to participate as a modeller to a ComMod process (Farolfi et al., 2010).
Then, during my PhD in computer Science applied to Modeling and Simulation, I learned the Theory of Modeling and Simulation and the Discrete EVent System specification formalism and proposed a conceptual, formal and operational framework to evaluate simulation models based on the way models are used instead of their ability to reproduce the target system behavior (Bonté et al., 2012). Applied to the surveillance of Epidemics, this work was rather theoritical but very educative and structuring to formulate my further models and research questions about modeling and simulation.
From 2011 to 2013, I worked on viability theory applied to forest management at the Compex System Lab of Irstea (now Inrae) and learned about the interest of agregated models for analytical results (Bonté et al, 2012; Mathias et al, 2015).
Since 2013, I’m working for Inrae at the joint The Joint Research Unit “Water Management, Actors, Territories” (UMR G-EAU) where I’m involved in highly engaging interdisciplinary researches such as:
- The Multi-plateforme International Summer School about Agent Based Modelling and Simulation (MISSABMS)
- The development of the CORMAS (COmmon Pool Resources Multi-Agents Systems) agent-based modeling and simulation Platform (Bommel et al., 2019)
- Impacts of the adaptation to global changes using computerised serious games (Bonté et al., 2019; Bonté et al. , 2021)
- The use of experimentation to study social behaviors (Bonté et al. 2019b)
- The impact of information systems in SES trajectories (Paget et al., 2019a)
- Adaptation and transformations of traditional water management and infrastructures systems (Idda et al., 2017)
- Situational multi-agent approaches for collective irrigation (Richard et al., 2019)
- Combining psyhcological and economical experiments to study relations bewteen common pool resources situations, economical behaviours and psychological attitudes.
My research is about modelling and simulation of complex systems. My work is to use, and participate to the development of, integrative tools at the formal level (based on the Discrete EVent System Specification (DEVS) formalism), at the conceptual level (based on integrative paradigms of different forms such as Multi-Agents Systems paradigm (MAS), SES framework or viability theory), and at the level of the use of modelling and simulation for collective decision making (based on the Companion Modelling approach (ComMod)). Since 2013 and my integration in the G-EAU mixt research units, my object of studies were focused on multi-scale social and ecological systems, applied to water resource management and adaptation of territories to global change and I added experimentation to my research interest, developping methods combining agent-based model and human subjects actions.
I studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at Istanbul Technical University. During my undergraduate studies I became interested in the field of Ecology and Evolution and did internships on animal behaviour in Switzerland and Ireland. I then went on to pursue a 2-year research Master’s in Evolutionary Biology (MEME) funded by the European Union. I worked on projects using computer simulations to investigate evolution of social complexity and human cooperation. I also did behavioural economics experiments on how children learn social norms by copying others. After my Master’s, I pursued my dream of doing fieldwork and investigating human societies. I did my PhD at UCL, researching cultural evolution and behavioural adaptations in Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo. During my PhD, I was part of an inter-disciplinary Hunter-Gatherer Resilience team funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I obtained a postdoctoral research fellowship from British Academy after my PhD. I am currently working as a British Academy research fellow and lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Medicine at UCL.