In this interdisciplinary PhD research the effect of socio-economic differentiation on land use and landscape change during past and present periods of accelerated growth and urbanization in Southwestern Anatolia, Turkey, will be explored using Agent-Based Modelling (ABM). ABM are widely used computational models to simulate the collective outcomes of aggregate individual behavior in complex systems. Shifting the focus from variables to agents, they allow to take into account differences and interactions between individual agents while simulating outcomes at the system level. Grounded Simulation (GS), as a specific ABM-approach, combines ABM with a Grounded Theory approach to qualitative research. It is particularly helpful when simulating the outcomes of choices made by social agents, including in-depth but qualitative knowledge about their decision making procedures in the model specifications in an iterative process. Combining the strengths of qualitative and quantitative research, it strengthens the fore- and backcasting capacities of social ABM for a combined analysis of past, present and future land use changes under pressure of rapid urban development. The objectives of this study are to develop an ABM of land use and landscape change under pressure of social change and urbanization in the Sagalassos/Ağlasun territory (SW Anatolia) in past and present. In a first stage, an ABM to analyze land use change in the current era is built, making use of existing databases of landcover changes (based on the processing of satellite images), coupled to the evolving land use decisions by farming households in the town of Ağlasun as observed in qualitative research and through a household panel survey (Joos et al., 2024). Individual farming households, clustered in groups making similar livelihood decisions, are the agents in the ABM; validation of the ABM is conducted on the basis of land cover change maps.
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