On 29th June, 2015, Rong-gang Cong, Assistant Professor of Department of Environmental Science in Aarhus University, visited CEEP-BIT. He gave a talk about “Optimizing agricultural land-use patterns through coordinated landscape management: an ecosystem-service perspective” and received a warm welcome. This seminar was hosted by Prof. Hua Liao, the deputy director of CEEP-BIT. Teachers along with students from CEEP-BIT attended this seminar.
Dr Rong-gang Cong gained Ph.D. degree in management science from Institute of policy and management, Chinese Academy of Science. He conducted his research in Centre for Environmental and Climate Research of Lund University as a researcher. He is the Assistant Professor of Department of Environmental Science in Aarhus University now. His research interests include resource and environmental economics, economic behavior analysis, biodiversity evaluation, multi-agent model, mechanism design and experimental economics.
This report consists of two parts. One is about the research and work experience of Dr. Rong-Gang Cong in Aarhus University, providing the opportunity for both Dr. Rong-Gang Cong and CEEP-BIT to exchange academic ideas and thoughts because of the similarity in researches. The other is about a talk given by Dr. Rong-Gang Cong. According to the report, coordinated or landscape-scale management of habitat in a multi-farm landscape results in higher provisioning of such ecosystem services compared to farm-scale management. However, to achieve optimal land-use under coordinated management it is necessary to define rules on how to use land to optimize aggregate benefits from ecosystem services. This paper demonstrates that the coordinated solution is characterized by a higher degree of habitat conservation generally and a configuration of habitat that is more dispersed rather than agglomerated. And then, this paper tests its rules characterizing optimal solutions on a range of assumptions about ecological parameter values and suggests that such rules could be used to improve governance of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes.
After this seminar, teachers and students from CEEP-BIT had a heated discussion with Dr. Rong-gang Cong, showing great interest in the optimization of agricultural land-use patterns.
