Bio

Ellen Szarleta is an assistant professor at Indiana University Northwest in the Division of Public and Environmental Affairs. She teaches classes in environmental law and economics as well as environmental policy. She is interested in NKS as a possible framework for examining how social institutions affect decision-making processes for environmental policy.

Project: Exploring Patterns of Land Use

The complexities of land-use change have challenged political scientists, economists, geographers, and other scientists for decades. Increasing pressures on global land resources recently led to a call for improved understanding of the role of institutions (i.e. rules/constraints defined by humans and used to guide interaction). Property rights defining the use and transfer of land are one such set of rules.

As a first step in exploring the relationship between property rights and land-use change, this project will examine images of land use under different property-rights regimes (e.g. private property, common property, and open-access property). The image patterns will be compared with simulation results.

Favorite Three-Color Cellular Automaton

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