Welcome to the Computational Laboratories Group in the Department of Geography at the University of Maryland. A computational laboratory is a well-specified simulation model coupled with careful experimental design and thorough testing.

Our group uses our GeoGraph agent-based computational laboratory extensions to RePast, and sometimes Genetic Algorithms, to conduct theory-driven explorations of distributed dynamic processes on richly-structured landscapes. Some of the dynamic processes we study include:

• agent-based models of epidemics and of the emergence of infectious diseases,
• economic geography and geographical economics,
• sector-driven models of long-run urban and regional development on networks,
• human-landscape interactions such as deforestation or the evolution of networks,
• shared-resource games and sustainability,
• spatial evolutionary game theory and the evolution of inequality,
• civil violence, and effective approaches to peacekeeping, and
• models of human and wildlife interactions surrounding parks and nature reserves.

Our landscapes range from synthetic network landscapes based on spatial small-worlds and scale-free networks to dynamic models of real world landscapes derived from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Remote Sensing (RS).