Liliana PérezUniversité de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Geography
Liliana Pérez
PhD Geography
About
52
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Montreal. My research interests center around the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques into the development of Agent-Based Models to solve complex socio-ecological problems in different kind of systems, such as urban, forest and wetland ecosystems.
Specialties: Agent-based modeling, GIScience, Complex socio-environmental systems, Forestry, Ecology
Additional affiliations
July 2013 - July 2019
May 2011 - June 2013
January 2011 - May 2011
Publications
Publications (52)
Engaging ecological resource users in intervention to protect resources is challenging for governments due to the self-interest of users and uncertainty about intervention consequences. Focusing on a case of forest insect infestations, we addressed questions of resource protection and environmentally responsible behavior promotion with a conceptual...
Guaranteeing efficient evacuations in urban communities is critical for preserving lives, minimizing disaster impacts, and promoting community resilience. Challenges such as high population density, limited evacuation routes, and communication breakdowns complicate evacuation efforts. Vulnerable populations, urban infrastructure constraints, and th...
Species distribution modeling helps understand how environmental factors influence species distribution, creating profiles to predict presence in unexplored areas and assess ecological impacts. This study examined the habitat use and population ecology of the Chilean dolphin in Seno Skyring, Chilean Patagonia. We used three models—random forest (RF...
Engaging ecological resource users in intervention to protect the resource is challenging for governments due to self-interest of users and uncertainty about intervention consequences. Focusing on a case of forest insect infestations, we addressed questions of resource protection and environmentally responsible behavior promotion with a conceptual...
Many archaeological assemblages from the Iberian Peninsula dated to the Last Glacial Maximum contain large quantities of European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) remains with an anthropic origin. Ethnographic and historic studies report that rabbits may be mass-collected through warren-based harvesting involving the collaborative participation of se...
Agent Based Model (Netlogo). This is an adapted version of the model developed by Seuru et al., (in press) of human hunting behavior in Iberia during the Last Glacial Maximum. Their model is also based on the model structure developed by Janssen and Hill (2014, 2016) to analyze hunting system among Ache hunter-gatherers and on the model of Wren et...
Human well-being relies significantly on the presence and role of pollinators, as they contribute to the vitality of ecosystems, support the reproduction of wild plants, increase crop yields, and strengthen overall food security 1 . While wild bee populations are dwindling 2 due to climate and environmental shifts, there has been a notable 45% rise...
If we are to analyze the diet of past foragers, we need to understand how humans make hunting choices.
Originating from behavioral ecology, several models issued from the Optimal Foraging Theory offer important insights about human diets. Since the “Broad Spectrum Revolution” hypothesis proposed by Flannery in 1969, the Diet Breadth Model (DBM) has...
Urban wetlands are essential to the longstanding health and well-being of cities. Acknowledged as rich in biodiversity and highly productive ecosystems, they provide ecosystem services represented in aspects such as air purification, urban climate regulation, physical and mental health, recreation, and contemplation, among a wide variety of other g...
This study analyzes the outcomes of Cellular Automata (CA) with different neighborhood sizes and spatial resolution configurations on the performance of the Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) model. The analysis is executed using three analogic images to extract the land use/land cover in Bogota, Colombia, for three years: 1998, 2004, and 2010. The...
Floods are one of the most perilous natural calamities that cause property destruction and endanger human life. The spatial patterns of flood susceptibility were assessed in this study using six applied machine learning (ML) models including Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP-NN), Adaptive Boosting (Ad...
Throughout history, pandemics have forced societies to think beyond typical management and control protocols. The main goals of this study were to simulate and understand the spatial dynamics of COVID-19 spread and assess the efficacy of two policy measures in Montreal, Canada, to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak. We simulated the COVID-19 outbreak u...
The main aim of this study was to predict current and future flood susceptibility under three climate change scenarios of RCP2.6 (i.e., optimistic), RCP4.5 (i.e., business as usual), and RCP8.5 (i.e., pessimistic) employing four machine learning models, including Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron Neural Netw...
Hoy en día el conejo europeo (Oryctolagus cuniculus) es considerado invasivo en varios países. Sin embargo, los motivos del inicio de la explotación de este lagomorfo en el Paleolítico Superior en la península ibérica son objeto de un intenso debate sin que todavía exista un consenso general sobre las causas que explican su introducción en la dieta...
Wildfires are a complex phenomenon emerging from interactions between air, heat, and vegetation, and while they are an important component of many ecosystems’ dynamics, they pose great danger to those ecosystems, as well as human life and property. Wildfire simulation models are an important research tool that help further our understanding of fire...
ContextValidation of models of Land Use and Cover Change often involves comparing maps of simulated and reference change. The interpretation of differences between simulated and reference change depends on the characteristics of the process being studied. Our paper focuses on validation of models of one-way land change processes that spread in spac...
One of the complexities of social systems is the emergence of behavior norms that are costly for individuals. Study of such complexities is of interest in diverse fields ranging from marketing to sustainability. In this study we built a conceptual Agent-Based Model to simulate interactions between a group of agents and a governing agent, where the...
Understanding interactions between prehistoric human populations and faunal
communities requires a combination of theoretical models and computer-based
simulations to reconstruct key aspects of cynegetic behaviors such as small game
hunting. Today there exists no general consensus as to the causes of the introduction of
the European rabbit (Oryctol...
Wildfires are a complex phenomenon emerging from interactions between air, heat, and vegetation, and while they are an important component of many ecosystems’ dynamics, they pose great danger to those ecosystems, and human life and property. Wildfire simulation models are an important research tool that help further our understanding of fire behavi...
We leverage applied machine learning to determine which environmental features are best associated with the “moving” behaviour(s) of a troop of olive baboons (Papio anubis; collared with GPS trackers at Mpala Research Centre, Kenya). Specifically, we develop a behaviour-selection surface informed by classification trees trained using movement traje...
Social systems are inherently complex and can be represented using agent-based modelling (ABM) methods. Based on the innovative work of Thomas Schelling, ABMs are used to represent, analyze, and forecast emergent spatial-temporal dynamics of residential segregation. Segregation is modelled by representing the complex dynamics between individual age...
Arid environments are characterized by the complex interaction between vegetation cover, surface soil properties, and the climate. The dynamic balance between these components makes arid environments highly susceptible to swift changes in vegetation cover and surface morphology in response to climate change. Furthermore, arid environments often sup...
Long‐term residential segregation can exacerbate social inequality and exclusion in urban populations. Existing models of segregation aim to represent and better understand drivers of segregation and assess possible segregation effects in response to incoming immigrant populations. However, these studies are not typically implemented on real geospa...
Background and Objectives: Modelling and simulation of forest land cover change due to epidemic insect outbreaks are powerful tools that can be used in planning and preparing strategies for forest management. In this study, we propose an integrative approach to model land cover changes at a provincial level, using as a study case the simulation of...
Arid environments are characterized by the complex interaction between vegetation cover, surface soil properties, and the climate. The dynamic balance between these components makes arid environments highly susceptible to swift changes in vegetation cover and in surface morphology in response to climate change. Furthermore, arid environments often...
As áreas úmidas estão entre os ecossistemas mais produtivos que existem, elas abrigam uma ampla biodiversidade de aves, peixes, vegetais, entre outros. Elas também desempenham papel fundamental no que diz respeito à mitigação e adaptação climática. Apesar de sua grande importância, estes ecossistemas estão cada vez mais ameaçados, seja pela interfe...
As áreas úmidas estão entre os ecossistemas mais produtivos que existem, elas abrigam uma ampla biodiversidade de aves, peixes, vegetais, entre outros. Elas também desempenham papel fundamental no que diz respeito à mitigação e adaptação climática. Apesar de sua grande importância, estes ecossistemas estão cada vez mais ameaçados, seja pela interfe...
A geografia tem por definição o estudo do conjunto da Terra, que é por sua natureza extremamente complexo e depende de um número inesgótavel de elementos e relações entre os sistemas que o compõem. A complexidade do mundo atrai cada vez mais a comunidade científica com o inuito de melhor entender e representar as inúmeras interações que ocorrem na...
RESUMO-A geografia tem por definição o estudo do conjunto da Terra, que é por sua natureza extremamente complexo e depende de um número inesgótavel de elementos e relações entre os sistemas que o compõem. A complexidade do mundo atrai cada vez mais a comunidade científica com o inuito de melhor entender e representar as inúmeras interações que ocor...
Residential segregation into spatial neighborhoods and boroughs is a well-known spatial dynamic process that characterise complex urban environments. Existing models of segregation, including the pioneering Schelling ones, often do not consider all the factors that can contribute to this process. Segregation as well as aggregation emerges from loca...
Illegal landfills are the source of many impacts that can alter the environment and represent a public health risk. This study investigates their spatiotemporal distribution in two representative areas of Gran Canaria: northwest (Zone A) and east (Zone B). Illegal landfill occurrence was simulated between 2000 and 2018, to estimate and spatially lo...
Adaptation to climate change requires prediction of its impacts, especially on ecosystems. In this work we simulated the change in bird species richness in the boreal forest of Quebec, Canada, under climate change scenarios. To do so, we first analyzed which geographical and bioclimatic variables were the strongest predictors for the spatial distri...
This book contains a selection of papers presented during a special workshop on Complexity Science organized as part of the 9th International Conference on GIScience 2016. Expert researchers in the areas of Agent-Based Modeling, Complexity Theory, Network Theory, Big Data, and emerging methods of Analysis and Visualization for new types of data exp...
Wildfires are the main cause of forest disturbance in the boreal forest of Canada. Climate change studies forecast important changes in fire cycles, such as increases in fire intensity, severity, and occurrence. The geographical information system (GIS) based cellular automata model, BorealFireSim, serves as a tool to identify future fire patterns...
Climate drives ecosystem processes and impacts biodiversity. Biodiversity patterns over large areas, such as Canada's boreal, can be monitored using indirect indicators derived from remotely sensed imagery. In this paper, we characterized the historical space–time relationships between climate and a suite of indirect indicators of biodiversity, kno...
Climate is getting more significant in the study of population dynamics. Experts agree on the fact that climate change will likely be one of the main drivers of ecological change in upcoming decades. The goal of this research is to identify the main drivers of Québec boreal bird species distribution, in order to generate models of future spatial di...
The goal of this research was to model the potential impact of climate change on food production, in the Fraser Valley and Peace River regions of British Columbia (BC), using historical crop yield and climate data. We identified eight indicator crops of importance for these regions of BC and utilized historical Census of Agriculture and climate dat...
Climate change is expected to alter temperature, precipitation, and seasonality with potentially acute impacts on Canada’s boreal. In this research we predicted future spatial distributions of biodiversity in Canada’s boreal for 2020, 2050, and 2080 using indirect indicators derived from remote sensing and based on vegetation productivity. Vegetati...
Forest insect disturbances have an ecological impact and are the cause of partial or complete stands mortality; hence they influence the forest cover change. The modeling of ecological processes such as insect disturbance is challenging due to the complexity of insect outbreaks in forest ecological systems, thus diverse spatial scales need to be co...
Este artículo explora la relación existente entre la geografía ymedio ambiente a partir de un breve análisis histórico desde finales del siglo XVIII que intenta revisar las diferentes tendencias conceptuales con relación al estudio de los problemas ambientales. En este sentido, se espera evidenciar que el medio ambiente ocupa un gran lugar dentro d...
The widespread outbreaks of Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) are responsible for infestations of lodgepole pine forests since 1990 in Canada. In British Columbia, this forest insect disturbance has resulted in losses of more than 13million hectares of pine trees. The complexity of the MPB emergence, aggregation and attack behaviour is captured by this st...
Extensive outbreaks of tree-killing insects have been occurring in many parts of North America, including the province of British Columbia, raising concerns about the health of pine forest ecosystems. The dynamic phenomenon of mountain pine beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, infestation outbreaks is an inherent spatial and temporal comp...
The forests of British Columbia, Canada have undergone an unprecedented Mountain Pine Beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, (MPB) infestation that has resulted in extensive mortality of lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta. The objective of this study is to apply the agent-based model (ABM) to simulate the MPB attack behaviour in order to evaluate how...
The propagation of communicable diseases through a population is an inherent spatial and temporal process of great importance for modern society. For this reason a spatially explicit epidemiologic model of infectious disease is proposed for a greater understanding of the disease's spatial diffusion through a network of human contacts.
The objective...