Modeling land use change from smallholder agricultural intensification

Agricultural expansion in the rural tropics brings much needed economic and social development in developing countries. On the other hand, agricultural development can result in the clearing of biologically-diverse and carbon-rich forests. To achieve both development and conservation objectives, many government policies and initiatives support agricultural intensification, especially in smallholdings, as a way to increase crop production without expanding farmlands. However, little is understood regarding how different smallholders might respond to such investments for yield intensification. It is also unclear what factors might influence a smallholder’s land-use decision making process. In this proposed research, I will use a bottom-up approach to evaluate whether investments in yield intensification for smallholder farmers would really translate to sustainable land use in Indonesia. I will do so by combining socioeconomic and GIS data in an agent-based model (Land-Use Dynamic Simulator multi-agent simulation model). The outputs of my research will provide decision makers with new and contextualized information to assist them in designing agricultural policies to suit varying socioeconomic, geographic and environmental contexts.

I have developed several agent-based and cellular automata applications combining agent-based modelling, geographical information systems and visualisation to understand the complex mechanisms of decision making in land use change and environmental stewardship in order to analyse:
• the role of pastoral agriculture in regional development,
• the tradeoffs between land use intensification and water quality,
• the adoption of land-based climate change mitigation practices, and
• the incorporation of cultural values into spatial futures or scenario modelling.

My simulation research focuses on the applications of ABM to organizational behavior studies. I study socially-distributed decision making—i.e., the process of exploiting external resources in a social environment—and I work to develop its theoretical underpinnings in order to to test it. A second stream of research is on how group dynamics affect individual perceptions of social responsibility and on the definition and measurement of individual social responsibility (I-SR).

My main interests are system dynamics and multi agent simulation used for support of business and marketing decisions (e.g. modeling of consumer markets) and in business education (e.g. development of open source business simulators). Amongst my other interests are applied marketing research, relationships between academia and industry, financial literacy, mind and concept mapping.

The main research area is operation research in logistics with a focus on logistic cluster development and innovative technology usage. Due to mathematical background, Gružauskas focuses on quantitative analysis by conducting simulations, stochastic and dynamic models and other analytical approaches to amplify the developed theories. Gružauskas also is working as a freelance data analyst with a focus on statistical analysis, web scraping and machine learning.

Current main research interests are concerned on diffusion of ICT among social actors of territorial systems: citizens(individuals and households), enterprises and governmental bodies. Most used methodological tools are , so far, multivariate statistics and Social Network Analysis.
I’d like to apply an ABM approach in the context of my PhD research project, aimed to observe the different modes of collaboration among universities and enterprises and tehir different effectiveness in terms of creation and spread of new knowledge.

I am interested in questions of method, and in the application of computational social models to a wide variety of national security questions (such as counterterrorism and counterinsurgency) as well as decision-making around complex natural resources such as water. My methods interest center on the use of qualitative social theory to inform the structure of computational social models, and the ways in which such models handle qualitative data. This raises questions around the nature of data and the ways in which computational social models convey information to decision-makers.