Research & draft project proposal for agriculture project

[jonas4climate]

[chayennealice]

Option 1.
A model of interference within plant monocultures
o Modeling an agricultural field as a cellular automata and then linking the possible states (homogeneous, periodic, chaotic) to real world situations and compare to already existing model: A model for assessing the effect of distance on disease spread in crop fields
o Contains information on probability of disease spread in certain directions etc. We could play with these in our model rules, as well as with our neighborhood

Possible research questions:

1. "How accurate are the patterns emerging in a CA of an agricultural fields"
2. "What influence does the probability of disease contamination have on the spread of a monoculture field"

Option 2.
Cellular automata-based spatial multicriteria land suitability simulation for irrigated agriculture
o In the simulation of this study, we attempted to model potential land suitability with CA transition rules and represent suitability distribution in a spatial context
o The AHP–CA–GIS tool was developed using C# .NET to construct the framework of the simulation software for suitability evaluation. MATLAB software–embedded components, which provide special features enabling users to create a component object model (COM) (Phan 2004), were incorporated to implement AHP for calculating criteria weights. The Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) ArcGIS Engine, which is a core set of cross-platform ArcObjects components compatible with multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) (ESRI 2008), was employed for spatial data manipulation and result displaying.

Possible research question: "What impact would the redefining of criteria for high/middle/low suitability in the established research impact the emergent behavior?"

Option for further exploration:

Variability in plant nutrients reduces insect herbivore performance
The proposed method is a flexible analysis tool. It does not require the plants in a regular lattice; rather the plant's location is defined by its metric coordinates. Like in any spatio-temporal analysis, the definition of the time interval between measurements plays an important role. Too short or too long intervals will make it impossible to identify a systematic pattern in disease spread. The method tests not only for non-randomness of disease spread in general, but it also helps to identify the effect of specific predictor variables. Thus, a specific hypothesis can be researched, helping to obtain insight into the mechanisms of disease spread and helping to develop specific disease management approaches.