ACCS Weekly Meeting

Place: Room 621, GP South (Building 78)
Time: Thursday 10rd November, 10:30 morning Tea. 11:00am seminar

Title: "AGISTMENT NETWORKS: COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE, RANGELANDS, AND
RESOURCE HETEROGENEITY"
Presenter: Ryan Mcallister, Csiro

Ryan is nearing the end of a three-year post-doctoral fellowship with
CSIRO's Rangelands and Savannas. He has been applying complex systems
science methods to problems faced by Australian rangeland systems, and
generally challenging the real worth of these new approaches in the context
of pressure on science to have greater impact in our society. In this
seminar he will discuss one aspect of this work, how pastoralists respond to
resource variation by using agistment networks to distribute grazing
pressure. Empirical findings and a theoretical model will be presented which
consider how the landscape shapes agistment networks, and what hope might
policy makers have in improving agistment outcomes by working with the grain
of local informal institutions.