Spatial Simulation: Exploring Pattern and Process

A ground-up approach to explaining dynamic spatial modelling for an interdisciplinary audience. Across broad areas of the environmental and social sciences, simulation models are an important way to study systems inaccessible to scientific experimental and observational methods, and also an essential complement to those more conventional approaches. The contemporary research literature is teeming with abstract simulation models whose presentation is mathematically demanding and requires a high level of knowledge of quantitative and computational methods and approaches. Furthermore, simulation models designed to represent specific systems and phenomena are often complicated, and, as a result, difficult to reconstruct from their descriptions in the literature. This book aims to provide a practical and accessible account of dynamic spatial modelling, while also equipping readers with a sound conceptual foundation in the subject, and a useful introduction to the wide-ranging literature. Spatial Simulation: Exploring Pattern and Process is organised around the idea that a small number of spatial processes underlie the wide variety of dynamic spatial models. Its central focus on three 'building-blocks' of dynamic spatial models - forces of attraction and segregation, individual mobile.

Chapter 1: Spatial Simulation Models: What? Why? How? -- Chapter 2: Pattern, Process and Scale -- Chapter 3: Aggregation and Segregation -- Chapter 4: Random Walks and Mobile Entities -- Chapter 5: Percolation and Growth: Spread in Heterogeneous Spaces -- Chapter 6: Representing Time and Space -- Chapter 7: Model Uncertainty and Evaluation -- Chapter 8: Weaving It All Together -- Chapter 9: In Conclusion.