Elena Irwin Receives NSF Grant Award

Elena Irwin, BES Co-PI and Associate Professor at Ohio State University, received a new competitive grant award from the National Science Foundation’s Geography and Spatial Sciences program to develop spatial agent-based models of urbanization. 

The two-year research project is joint with Yong Chen, assistant professor at Oregon State University, and Ciriyam Jayaprakash, Professor of Physics, Ohio State University.  

The BES researchers are developing spatial economic models of land development and will apply them to the Baltimore region to study past and future policy alternatives and ecosystem impacts.  The models will be calibrated using extensive historical data on residential subdivision and urban land development that Irwin and other BES researchers have developed over the past several years.

This is a plat map of a residential subdivision in Carroll County. Using data from Maryland Archives, we are using these plat maps to create spatial datasets of residential subdivision development for Carroll, Harford, Baltimore and Howard Counties. The new grant will make use of these data to develop agent-based spatial models of household location and land development that will be used to run past and future policy scenarios.