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Ronja Hotz is a PhD student in the Land Use Change & Climate Research Group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where she has been working since August 2023. Her research focuses on understanding and modelling the social processes underlying land use change using agent-based modelling, with a particular emphasis on the CRAFTY framework. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Freie Universität Berlin and a Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from Technische Universität Berlin.
Prior to her PhD, she worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, where she implemented a generic decision-making layer for land managers in agent-based socio-ecological models. The framework was analysed in a stylised model to investigate emergent dynamics and critical transitions and was subsequently integrated into the InSEEDS model, which simulates the adoption of conservation agriculture at regional to global scales.
Agent-based modelling; socio-ecological systems; land use change; human decision-making and behaviour; social norms and learning; spreading processes on complex networks; critical transitions and social tipping dynamics for sustainability transformations.
I am fascinated by unraveling water-scarcity patterns. I am an expert in Integrated Assessment Modelling and Water Footprint Assessment. The concepts and tools that I have developed and applied all aim at availing knowledge at scales relevant to decision-makers in the water sector. During my PhD at the University of Twente I evaluated how spatiotemporal patterns of water availability relate to patterns of water use for a river basin in the semi-arid Northeast of Brazil. I have used agent-based modelling and developed the downstreamness concept to analyze the emergence of basin closure. This concept is helpful to water managers for identifying priority locations for intervention inside a river basin system. As a postdoc I continued to evaluate the relation between water use and availability and further broadened my scope to a wider range of related topics.