Mark’s research focuses on the effects of environmental change on rural and urban landscapes with an emphasis on the development and application of agent-based, social simulation models. Models are combined with the development of scenarios to explore the response of individuals and society to different environmental change drivers in the future.

He was a Lead Author to the IPCC 2nd, 3rd 4th and 5th Assessment Reports, is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Future Earth AIMES project, is currently Co-Chair of the IPBES regional assessment for Europe & Central Asia (2015-2018), and was a member of the Expert Panel of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (phase 2). He was also one of the founding members of the Ecosystem Services Community – Scotland.

Dominic is an applied economist specialising in the areas of environmental and resource economics and policy analysis in developed and developing countries. His research focuses on applying economics to environmental management and the development of interdisciplinary approaches to resource allocation problems in agriculture and global food security. 

He has a particular interest in measurement of public preferences for environmental change and their use in policy making. The majority of his work at SRUC has addressed the issue of public goods provision from agriculture and rural land use. This encompasses the demand and supply of environmental amenity, environmental resilience, animal health and welfare.

Peter’s research interests are in the social, economic and ecological interactions and trade-offs within land use systems.   His approaches typically use high-performance computing to apply data and computationally intensive techniques, such as agent-based modelling, to improve understanding of these complex systems. 

He has successfully applied these skills to investigate the UK perennial energy crop market, using agent-based modelling techniques, with the results used to assist industry in assessing the UK biomass market.  He has also worked on analysing the drivers for agricultural land use change, and led an international model inter-comparison exercise on land use.

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/peter-alexander

https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/land_and_food_lab/

Roslyn has a background in ecology and evolution. Her PhD focused on developing individual based genetically and spatially explicit models to investigate the evolution of dispersal and the consequence of this for eco-evolutionary species range dynamics.

After her PhD Roslyn worked on a short project modelling the impact of ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) on connectivity in collaboration with the Woodland Trust. Specifically, the project investigated the impact of the loss of roadside trees on the movement of insects as agents through the landscape.

Frances Warren has a background in applied development and agricultural economics. She joins the RUGS team after completing a PhD which looked at the adoption of mechanized technology in cereal farming systems of northern Ghana.

Previously, she spent several years working in policy research at the World Bank and the International Food Policy Institute on private sector development and agricultural policy at a national and global scale. She has co-authored work on cross-country comparison of value chains for simple manufactured goods in China, Vietnam, and Ethiopia; and on supply models for agricultural machinery in Ghana. Her research interests are to bring economic perspectives and techniques to the social, economic, and ecological trade-offs in agriculture and food systems.

Magnus has just finished his MSc in Ecological Economics, which covered different methodological approaches for the evaluation of policy options to deal with socio-ecological problems. He wrote his final dissertation on carbon emissions and employment, using input-output analysis.

With an interdisciplinary background around institutional economics, Magnus has worked on malnourishment, education and development in Rajasthan and on food security during the ongoing drought in Sub-Saharan Africa at the German embassy in Pretoria. He has also collected experience in the change management of large corporates and in working on a family-run farm in Southern Germany. He is interested in conflicts between socioeconomic objectives and the regenerative and assimilative capacities of ecosystems.