Date: September 11, 2024
Location: Room 1223,College of Forestry, Wildlife and Environment
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Title: Agent-based land change modeling: Considering the impact of landscape visibility
Attendees: 17 people
On September 11, 2024, Dr. Wenwu Tang delivered a great presentation titled “Agent-based land change modeling: Considering the impact of landscape visibility”. The seminar, attended by 17 people in person, and additional participants via Zoom, explored the integration of landscape visibility into agent-based modeling of land use and land cover change.
Dr. Tang introduced a bottom-up simulation approach designed for modeling complex adaptive spatial systems. His spatially explicit agent-based land change model incorporates landscape visibility into the decision-making process for land development. The model was used to study the land cover changes in Buncombe County, NC and the city of Asheville from 2001 to 2019. The results not only improved the accuracy of land cover changes, but also reduced computational time.
The seminar concluded with an engaging Q & A session, where faculty and students asked several questions such as: The researcher spent lots of time to calculate the landscape visibility, but the final model accuracy did not improve too much, do we still need to include the visibility calculation in future? In the Agent-Based Models (ABM) model, have you considered the impact of building blocks? Why did you choose ABM model instead of other models, e.g., CNN and GNN? What is the model framework? Could you explain the difference between ABM and Bayesian model?
Dr. Tang’s presentation and the later meeting at the CHES lab (CFWE 3230) highlighted the importance of incorporating landscape visibility into land change models and showcased the advantages of using cyberinfrastructure-enabled high-performance tools for landscape visibility analytics. Other topics such as the wise use of AI (e.g., ChatGPT) in teaching and research, organizing symposia or attending professional conferences, and working on projects or papers were also discussed.
