Abstract

Dr. Sun will first introduce his past research work including cellular automata based urban land use simulation, Bayesian network and Agent-based models. Then he will present a short talk on a conceptual model, regime shift, in understanding land system transformation. Land systems are coupled social environmental systems (SESs) and characterized by intrinsic complexity entailing non-linear dynamics, self-organization, multi-scale feedbacks and emergence. Understanding the dynamic evolution of land systems is a pivotal task of land change science and has profound policy implications for sustainable management of land resources and ecosystem services. Yet, this is notoriously challenging, particularly, when land systems exhibit regime shifts, defined as a persistent, radical, abrupt, and often surprising change to an alternative system state with distinct structure and functions. The concept of regime shifts has been increasingly applied in ecology but has only received little attention in land system science. Dr. Sun will present this concept and an application case in SE Asia. Although the case presented is in rural and agricultural setting, the concept can be equally applied in the transformation of urban systems.