Research Overview
My coupled human-natural systems research in Spain is oriented around the interaction between land use/cover change and wildfire. This research has concentrated on a study area in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, to the west of the city of Madrid.

With colleagues I have examined statistical methods to investigate human impacts on both land use/cover change (Millington et al. 2007) and wildfire risk (Romero-Calcerrada et al. 2008, Romero-Calcerrada et al. 2008).

My PhD research resulted in the construction of a spatially-explicit simulation model that combined agent-based (see Millington et al. 2008), vegetation state-and-transition and cellular automata approaches (see Millington et al. 2009).

The model was used as a case study to explore how local stakeholders can contribute to the evaluation of agent-based models of land use (Millington et al. 2011). It also featured as an example in a paper reviewing the potential representing of human-activity, via agent-based modelling approaches, in landscape evolution modelling (Wainwright and Millington 2010)

Refinement of the model is on-going to allow us to simulate the interaction between human activity, vegetation dynamics, wildfire and other landscape dynamics.

Read blog posts on my PhD and related research