Complex Systems Modeling of Human-Environment Interactions

Preface

To my dad, the enthusiast of online lecture materials in Python.

These lecture notes (Web, PDF, Google Colab) provide an integrated perspective on different modeling approaches (dynamics, equilibrium, and agent-based) applied to human-environment interactions and sustainability transitions. Its scope is practical, utilizing Python within Jupyter Notebooks. Prerequisites are basic mathematical skills.

This is version 0.2. To be updated and improved.

Learning goals

After working through all materials,

• students can model human-environment interactions
  to answer relevant questions in sustainability science.
• students can implement models of human-environment interactions
  in the general-purpose computer language Python.
• students can critically evaluate models of human-environment interactions
  to judge their relevance to issues in sustainability science.

Integrated writing and reproducibility

The following steps are entirely optional for readers who want to focus on the learning goals and are not interested in the development of these lecture notes.

These lecture notes are written in Jupyter Notebooks, which are a popular format for interactive computing. Notebooks contain code, math, and text. The code is written in Python, a general-purpose programming language widely used in scientific computing and other fields.

Scholarly writing practices, such as citations and cross-references, are facilitated by Quarto, a powerful scientific and technical publishing system. Quarto also allows you to view these lecture notes in various formats, such as HTML and PDF.

Assuming you have installed the Quarto CLI, you can render these lecture notes by running the following command in the terminal:

!quarto render .

The comment #| output: false is a Quarto directive that prevents the output of this cell from being displayed in the rendered documents. This is useful for keeping these readable.

These lecture notes are made open-source and hosted in a GitHub repository. To convert this index.ipynb file (which is required in the Quarto Book project type) into the repository’s README file, one may execute the following commands:

!quarto convert index.ipynb # convert into Quarto markdown
!tail -n +10 index.qmd > README.md  # remove some metadata+
!rm index.qmd  # remove the intermediate file

After configuring the settings for GitHub Pages, one can publish the web version of these lecture notes by running the following command (at the root of the cleaned main branch):

quarto publish gh-pages

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the students I had the pleasure of working with on this material. Their feedback has been, is, and will continue to be essential for shaping this content. I would also like to thank my teachers and mentors, who have influenced my thinking. I am thankful to all contributors and creators of the many open-source projects these notes build upon, such as the Python language and its ecosystem, Jupyter, and Quarto. Furthermore, I acknowledge many helpers who may use some form of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, GitHub Copilot, and Grammarly. All remaining errors remain my own.