29 Sep 2009

Michael Renton will give a talk in Blakers UWA Maths at 6pm:

Modelling agro-ecological processes in agricultural systems and 
landscapes in order to optimise management decisions

Michael Renton

In this talk I will present a number of current research problems 
that involve modelling agro-ecological processes in agricultural 
systems and landscapes in order to optimise management decisions. 
These include:
* Planning optimal sequences of land-uses for a single land unit 
across time, while taking into account variability and uncertainty 
in weather and price
* Planning optimal patterns of land-use across space, 
while considering trade-offs between biodiversity, 
carbon sequestration and agricultural production
* Determining the optimal management of invasive organisms
* Identifying optimal management strategies for avoiding or 
delaying the evolution of resistance to biocides in weeds and 
insect pests
Our current approaches include individual-based computational 
simulation, constructing empirical ‘summary models’ and 
heuristic evolutionary optimisation algorithms, but I will be keen 
to get feedback on new approaches for tackling these problems!