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Mark Moritz's project proposal is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s EAGER (Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research) program

July 30, 2015

Mark Moritz's project proposal is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s EAGER (Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research) program

Mark Moritz

Mark Moritz has just learned that his project proposal, “Modeling Coupled Herd and Household Dynamics in Pastoral Systems,” is being funded by the National Science Foundation’s EAGER (Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research) program.  The project will focus their efforts on developing an agent-based model to examine the impact of the domestic cycle of households on the demography of family herds and ultimately on regional livestock populations. Empirical data from previous studies will be used to parameterize the agent-based model. The model will simulate the domestic cycle of an initial population of 100 households and the demographic processes of their family herds for 250 years (or 10 generations). The simulations will allow the researchers to examine how the domestic cycle affects herd demography by examining the impact of changes in age of first marriage, increase in the number of sons, or increase in polygyny rates. In addition, the simulations will be used to examine how sensitive the growth of regional livestock populations is to changes in the herd-size threshold, i.e., whether a lower threshold leads to stronger growth of livestock populations at the regional level. Findings from this research will provide insight into livestock population dynamics in pastoral societies, in particular the question of why these populations do not seem to increase in the absence of major disasters like droughts and diseases.

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