News
I was recently interviewed by writer Kathleen Shannon about the similarities between ranchers and pastoralists as part of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. You can read the…
I joined Tip Hudson for another episode of Art of Range to talk about the February theme of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). Here is the description of the episode: …
The Routledge Handbook of Pastoralism that I co-edited with Igshaan Samuels, Nikolaus Schareika, and Eva Schlecht is scheduled to be published in June 2026. This handbook provides a comprehensive…
Together with other members of the Working Group on Pastoralism and Land Rights of the Global Alliance for the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP), including Flora Vern and…
Franny Lazarus from OSU News wrote a really nice piece about my involvement in the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). It is accompanied by two great pictures: one from Zoé L…
I was interviewed about our agent-based model of the emergence of an ideal free distribution for the Ten Minute Dialogs, a series of interviews with social and ecological model authors that focus…
Our new article is out in the journal of Agricultural and Human Values. Here is the abstract:
Livestock systems across the world are transformed by capitalist forces. Understanding these…
I contributed a 10-minute video on agent-based modeling to the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP) International Curriculum. Here is a description of the curriculum. Spanning 15…
Chelsea Hunter, one of Ohio Sea Grant’s six Knauss Fellows, didn’t originally picture herself working in the legislative branch. The Ohio State PhD student from the Department of…
We published a new paper for a special issue on rewilding for the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science. In the paper, we review three decades of studies of the Logone Floodplain to examine…
Chelsea Hunter successfully defended her dissertation Co-Managing Sovereignty: Collaborative Biodiversity Conservation and Indigenous Sovereignty in Kanaky/New Caledonia and graduated on…
We published a new paper: Moritz, Mark, Benjamin Cross, Chelsea E. Hunter. 2023. Artificial Pastoral Systems: A Review of Agent-Based Modeling Studies of Pastoral Systems. Pastoralism:…
Chelsea Hunter has been awarded a Knauss fellowship, which is a one-year paid opportunity for current and recent graduates from advanced degree programs to apply their scientific knowledge and…
We just published a new paper in Human Ecology. Moritz, Mark, Chelsea E. Hunter, Daniel C. Peart, Abigail Buffington, Andrew J. Yoak, Jason R. Thomas, Rebecca Garabed, and Ian M. Hamilton…
We published our new agent-based model in the CoMSES Computational Model Library. This purpose of this model is to understand how the coupled demographic dynamics of herds and households constrain…
In the July-August 2022 issue of American Scientist, Mark Moritz and Nicholas C. Kawa published an article: “The world needs wicked scientists.” In the article, Moritz and Kawa discuss how the…
The Council of Academic Affairs has approved the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization (GIS) in Wicked Sciences in their meeting on March 1, 2023. No additional level of review or approval is…
In the week of 14-18 November 2022, Nikolaus Schareika and I led a workshop on transformations in livestock systems at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, NM, which was supported…
Paul Scholte and I met with Tipton D. Hudson, Professor, Rangeland & Livestock Management at Washington State University Extension to talk about pastoralist refugees in the Far North Cameroon on…
An interdisciplinary team of staff and faculty, with Mark Moritz, Nicholas Kawa, Alison Bennett, Rachel Kajfez, Elizabeth Newton, Charlene Brenner, David Sovic, and Yolanda Zepeda has received an…
I wrote a review of Profits vs. Preservation: How can shepherds balance the social and ecological costs of livestock grazing on Naxos? for World Development Perspectives.
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Our piece The World needs Wicked Scientists was published in American Scientist. Here is the abstract: Many problems facing humanity are so daunting they seem impossible to solve. Among these…
We published a short news article for Oryx about how insecurity in the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon has driven thousands of pastoralists to seek refuge in Waza National Park in Cameroon.
Our paper The danger of a single story about Fulani pastoralists is out in the journal Pastoralism. Our critical analysis focuses on a factsheet published by the United States Commission on…
New paper in Nature Climate Change on Climate Change Adaptation and Community Autonomy from an interdisciplinary team led by Anne Pisor. Here is short summary of the argument: Communities…
Doctoral candidate Chelsea Hunter has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to support her dissertation research. Chelsea's research…
I also enjoyed mystery conversation with Michael Cox on the In Common podcast about my work on open property regimes in pastoralist systems and about slow science.
I enjoyed my conversation with David Staley about my research on pastoralists and common-pool resources on the podcast Voices of Excellence, which is available on Soundcloud and iTunes.
Our paper Conservation overstretch and long-term decline of wildlife and tourism in the Central African savannas was published in Conservation Biology. Here is a short news item from Ohio State…
I have now also started publishing the data from our Modeling Regime Shifts in the Logone floodplain (MORSL), which was supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH)…
Very excited to see that Paulo van Breugel is using the herd tracking data that we published in the Movebank data repository for educational purposes, including how to create animated maps. The…
I have joined thirty-two other buckeyes as Drake Institute Affiliates for the 2021-22 academic year. The Affiliate Program identifies and recognizes faculty, administrators, and staff dedicated to…
Our paper Training wicked scientists for a world of wicked problems is out in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Here is the abstract: Humanity faces a number of wicked problems, from…
On Thursday 15 July, Daniel Peart, Chelsea Hunter, Ian Hamilton, and Mark Moritz led a workshop on agent-based modeling using NetLogo for the 2021 Data Science for Women Summer Camp organized by…
Twenty-one researchers have been named to the first cohort for the Growing Research Opportunities (GRO) Academy (and I am part of that cohort!). The cohort will engage in educational sessions led…
We have published the report of our first virtual SESYNC workshop on Synthesizing Research on Pastoral Governance of Common-Pool Resources. The report summarizes the discussions…
Together with Lance Robinson, Ryan Unks, Chelsea Hunter, Gunnar Dressler, and Jürgen Groeneveld, we organized a four-day virtual workshop on Synthesizing Research on Pastoral Governance of Common…
Together with Nikolaus Schareika and Chris Brown, I published a paper in Current Anthropology on Critical Transitions from Pastoralism to Ranching in Central Africa. It is the result of a slow…
My picture Striking a Pose won 1st place in the People Category of the International Photography Exhibition of the Office of International Affairs. Here is link to the announcement of the…
A team led by Inés Valdez (Political Science) and Mark Moritz (Anthropology) is creating curriculum and tools for training data science students, researchers and professionals that consider how…
The Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) is expanding their scope this autumn by piloting a racial justice grant. This new opportunity will support instructors who are incorporating assignments,…
Dr. Elizabeth Gardiner successfully defended her dissertation Land Privatization, Tenure Security, and Food Security in Rural Burkina Faso on Monday 17 August. The dissertation is based…
My presentation Pastoralists’ Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Working toward a Synthesis for the IASC 2020 Web Conference on African Commons is available online. It is work in…
Our awesome team just completed our second Big Game Theory summer camp for middle schoolers at the PAST Foundation. The goal of the Big Game Theory camp is to train campers to use a systems…
Our paper on Contemporary pastoralism in the Dhofar Mountains of Oman is out in the journal Human Ecology. It is one of the papers coming forth out of Lawrence Ball's dissertation research.
Our paper on the hydraulic impact of fish canals is out in the Journal of Hydrology. The lead author is Apoorva Shastry, a former graduate student from our MORSL team.
Shastry, Apoorva…
Offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Research Experience for Graduates (REG) grant provides supplemental funding to support the cost of a “Cultural Anthropology student’s closely…
Our paper Comparative Study of Territoriality across Forager Societies just came out in Human Ecology.
Moritz, Mark, Shane Scaggs, Craig Shapiro, Sarah Hinkelman. 2020 Comparative Study of…
Our research team was awarded a Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship by the Royal Geographical Society to study grazing pressure in the Dhofar Mountains of Oman. The team consists of Lawrence…
Our paper, Trends and spatial patterns of 20th century temperature, rainfall and PET in the semi-arid Logone River basin, Sub-Saharan Africa, has been published in the Journal of Arid Environments…
Annalee Sekulić started volunteering for the Ancient Socioecological Systems in Oman (ASOM) project as a sophomore, and soon after she found herself traveling to the Arabian Peninsula to do…
I visited Penn State University to give a talk about Insecurity and its impacts on pastoral systems in the Chad Basin in the Seminar Series of the African Studies Program and meet with…
Nikolaus Schareika and I received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to study the diversity and dynamics of livestock husbandry systems, i.e., go beyond the categories of ranchers and…
I will present a new talk in the EED Research Seminar Series on how anthropologists use rigorous research design in ethnographic research projects in which I draw from my research with mobile…
Daniel Peart presented preliminary results from our ASOM project at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver, Canada.
It's official. The National Science Foundation will support our modeling study of the demographic dynamics of herds and households in pastoral systems. The team consists of Ian Hamilton (EEOB…
Mark Anthony Arceño and I presented how we use Carmen Canvas to support transformative learning in the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at the Innovate Fall Showcase. We…
All the mobility data from my CAREER project has now been published in the Movebank Data Repository. Today I published the second dataset that we used to examine whether there was an ideal free…
This week, students played Go Theory in my graduate seminar on anthropological theory. The game is based on the Dutch game Kwartet, which is a more complex version of Go Fish…
My photo "Camel Culture" has been selected for the 2019 International Photography Exhibition of the Office of International Affairs. It is a picture of me taking a picture of our guide Hassan…
The workshop proposal that Lance Robinson and I put together has been accepted by SESYNC. The workshop brings together scholars and practitioners of pastoralists governance of common-pool grazing…
The IFD data from our Current Anthropology (2014) and Land Use Policy (2019) papers is published in the Movebank Data Repository.
This dataset describes the distribution of mobile…
Mark Anthony Arceño and I presented how we use Carmen Canvas to support transformative learning in the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at the Innovate Fall Showcase. We explained how…
Our paper Comparative Study of Pastoral Property Regimes in Africa Offers No Support for Economic Defensibility Model is out in Current Anthropology. Here is the abstract: The economic…
Our DECML team published two papers in Epidemics - one examines the role of carriers of foot-and-mouth disease in endemic contexts and the other examines the role of pastoral mobility on the…
I use Zachary Short's Grad School Essentials in my graduate seminar Theory in Cultural Anthropology to help them succeed in graduate school. Here is what students in my previous classes…
Our ASOM team just completed our first Big Game Theory summer camp at the PAST Foundation.
Our chapter Entre auto-organisation et planification dans la plaine d’inondation du Logone (Cameroun) is published in the volume Le Tchad des lacs, edited by Christine Raimond, Florence Sylvestre,…
New chapter in an edited volume Global Perspectives on Long Term Community Resource Management, edited by Ludomir Lozny and Thomas McGovern.
Our awesome research team recently visited the Innovation Lab at the PAST Foundation to run a workshop for middle-school students on systems thinking using NetLogo agent-based modeling software…
This semester, Kelly and Chris defended their dissertations and become Dr. Yotebieng and Dr. Brown. Kelly's dissertation is titled The capacity to aspire among Rwandan urban refugee women in…
Our paper Network analyses of transhumance movements and simulations of foot-and-mouth disease virus transmission among mobile livestock in Cameroon is out in Epidemics. Here is the citation and…
Our paper that examines the resilience of the pastoral property regime in the Logone Floodplain of Cameroon is out in the journal Land Use Policy. Here is the abstract:
Previous studies have…
Our chapter on adapting to the challenges of interdisciplinary research of coupled systems is out. Here is the full citation. Email me for a copy.
Laborde, Sarah, Sui Chian Phang, and Mark…
The Department of Anthropology recently changed the course Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTHROP 2202), which has been taught for almost as long as the department has been around, by no…
Initiated by the Pastoralist Knowledge Hub of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and authored by Jonathan Davies et al of the International Union for Conservation of…
Our paper Emergent Sustainability in Open Property Regimes is out in PNAS. In the paper, we compared eight cases with more or less open access to common-pool resources to develop a…
The ASOM research team is currently in its third field season, collecting hyrax middens, conducting a botanical study, and surveying the area for monuments and settlements. I had the pleasure of…
We recently redesigned our introduction to cultural anthropology course using the ANTH101 course from award-winning professor Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. The premise of the course…
Our paper on Research in the Red Zone is published in The Geographical Journal. The paper describes how our research team adapted to increasing insecurity in the field caused by Boko…
Mark Anthony Arceño is one of 20 recipients of the Chateaubriand Humanities and Social Sciences fellowship, which is sponsored by the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the U.S. The…
At the SESYNC Boundary Spanning conference I presented the preliminary synthesis of our MORSL project in a poster titled Synthesizing data, concepts, and models in interdisciplinary research…
Nikolaus Schareika and I presented our paper on Critical Transitions from Pastoralism to Ranching in Central Africa at the Workshop Land deals and their consequences in the Global South at the Max…
Interview with Mouazamou Ahmadou, collaborator from the University of Maroua, in newspaper
on insecurity in and around the National Park of Bouba Ndjidda in Cameroon.
New paper in Human Ecology by Sarah Laborde et al. on the interplay of top-down planning and adaptive self-organization in an African floodplain. Here is the abstract: Natural floodplains are…
Pallavi Oruganti, a former undergraduate in anthropology, published her undergraduate thesis in the journal Human Dimensions of Wildlife. The article is titled Hunters’ knowledge, attitudes, and…
I published the first two datasets from my CAREER project in the Movebank Data Repository. The two data packages have their own DOI and citation:
Moritz M (2018) Data from: Simulating the…
Mouadjamou Ahmadou and Sarah Laborde published their film Fishing canals of the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon in a special issue on Social Water of the online magazine Voices. Here is a…
My photo Cattle in Dust Storm won 3rd place in the category Places in the 2017 OIA photography competition. The picture was taken during a dust storm that colored everything yellow. I was…
We are developing a new track in anthropology at the Ohio State University, tentatively titled Human-Environment Learning Lab and are encouraging outstanding undergraduates and masters students to…
The research of our MORSL project is featured in a story map of Global Inland Fisheries which features a series of case studies of inlnd fisheres from around the globe. Here is the description of…
We just wrapped up our Research Team Seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) to discuss what explains the sustainability of open property regimes. Here is the abstract. The goal of the…
Sevidzem Silas Lendzele, one of the DECML graduate students from Cameroon, won the prize for Best Poster from an FMD-Endemic Region at the recent Global FMD Research Alliance conference. He did a…
Together with Alice Kelly Pennaz, Mouadjamou Ahmadou, and Paul Scholte, I published a new piece in The Conversation titled Why blaming ivory poaching on Boko Haram isn’t helpful. It is a longer…
I presented a paper on the Impacts of Boko Haram on transhumance in the Far North Region of Cameroon for a USFWS workshop on Transhumant Pastoralism in Africa's Sudano-Sahel.
Our paper on cattle raids as a source of funding for Boko Haram is out in the journal Conservation and Society. Pennaz, Alice Kelly, Mouadjamou Ahmadou, Mark Moritz, Paul Scholte. 2018. Not seeing…
A paper from Karla Moreno-Torres' dissertation is published in the journal PLOS ONE. Here is the link and abstract: Pathogen transmission across species drives disease emergence; however,…
Our paper "No magic number: An examination of the herd-size threshold in pastoral systems using agent-based modeling" has been published Human Ecology. Here is the abstract: Pastoralists who…
My piece on "How to teach about African foragers" has been published in Anthropology News. It is, of course, inspired by Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to write about Africa". "One of my favorite…
The first week of May 2017, 25 Master and Doctoral students from the universities of Maroua and Ngaoundéré gathered in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, for the first research workshop on Coupled Human And…
My paper on Misreading a pastoral property regime is out in Ecology and Society. The paper is a response to an article by Haller et al. (2013) in Ecology and Society titled “How fit turns into…
A short video about the work of Aboukar Mahamat and CACID in the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon. The video celebrates the winner of the 2002 Equator Prize: CACID.
I just published a blog post on EnviroSociety about studying African floodplains as coupled systems. The post is inspired by a quote from Gregory Bateson, “The major problems in the world are the…
In the last year, four new undergraduate researchers have joined the lab. They are working on a range of different but overlapping research projects. Sophia Kiselova-Sammons works on pastoralists…
Our paper One Health Research in Cameroon PDF was published in Practicing Anthropology. In the paper, we argue for anthropology’s involvement in One Health research because it promotes…
A new edited volume Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation by Eric Jones and A.J. Faas just came out, with my chapter on networks and hazard adaptation among West…
My new paper on Open Property Regimes came out in the International Journal of the Commons. Here is the abstract:
In the literature on the commons, open access is considered the absence of a…
Two five-year positions supported by the National Science Foundation and The Ohio State University for an interdisciplinary research project that examines the environmental…
A new paper from our MORSL lab is out in Global Environmental Change. Sarah Laborde, Alfonso Fernandez, Sui Chian Phang, Ian M. Hamilton, Nathaniel Henry, Hahn Chul Jung, Aboukar Mahamat,…
Nikolaus Schareika, Professor at Göttingen University, and I have started a new research project on African pastoral systems. After almost two years of Skype meetings, we were able to work for day…
Together with colleagues in the department I have started a new working group. We are currently in the process of developing a graduate program in the study of social-ecological systems, which is…
Mouadjamou Ahmadou and I wrote a short piece for The Conversation about pastoralist refugees in Cameroon. It describes the challenges they face as they are forced to migrate to areas that are…
Our grant proposal Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled System - Joy McCorriston (PI), Ian Hamilton and Mark Moritz - will be funded by the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of…
Our first MORSL paper on modeling the hydraulics of the Logone Floodplain is out in the Journal of Hydrology.
Alfonso Fernández, Mohammad Reza Najafi, Michael Durand, Bryan G. Mark, Mark…
IUCN Netherlands is partnering with our collaborator ACEEN because of the threat of oil exploration and extraction in the Logone Floodplain, which puts fisheries, pastoralism, agriculture, and…
The Anthropology podcast, A Story of Us, developed and produced by the graduate students in our deparment, has gone live. You can access it here or on iTunes. Starting in August 2016, they will be…
An agent-based model that examines the role of livestock mobility on the transmission of foot-and-mouth disease is posted at OpenABM. The purpose of the model is to understand how host mobility…
Another version of my piece on big data - Big data’s ‘streetlight effect’: where and how we look affects what we see - was published by the Conversation, which is an independent source of…
Pallavi Oruganti, an undergraduate researcher in our DECML lab, successfully defended her senior thesis in April. The thesis, Hunters' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practice towards Wildlife Disease…
Nathaniel Henry, undergraduate researcher in our MORSL lab, successfully defended his honors thesis, which uses an agent-based model to examine the economic impact on fisheries in the Logone…
Our grant proposal Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled System - Joy McCorriston (PI), Ian Hamilton and Mark Moritz - will be recommended for funding by the National Science Foundation’s…
Kelly Yotebieng has been informed that her proposal, “The City from the perspective of urban refugees in Yaoundé, Cameroon,” has been recommended for funding by the National Science Foundation…
I wrote a cautionary note about the use of big data for the blog of TDA@OSU drawing on the work of Mike Agar, Joe Henrich and others.
Our paper Simulating the Transmission of Foot-And-Mouth Disease Among Mobile Herds in the Far North Region, Cameroon has been published in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.The…
Pallavi Orunganti has won third place at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum for her poster presentation Hunters' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices towards Wildlife Diseases in Ohio…
Our paper Studying the Logone floodplain, Cameroon, as a coupled human and natural system was published in the African Journal of Aquatic Science. Here is the abstract: African floodplains are an…
I gave a talk at the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University at 12 February 2016 about my research on open property regimes in pastoral systems.
Together with Elizabeth Gardiner and Amber Johnson I presented preliminary results of our Comparative study of Pastoral Tenure Systems at the CS-DC'15, the first world e-conference organized by…
Abby Buffington, who is working on our EAGER project, has received word that her National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) proposal has been approved for…
The World Bank report on resilience in Africa's drylands is available on the web as conference edition or a work in progress for the forthcoming book, Confronting Drought in Africa’s Drylands:…
The book Governance of Rangelands: Collective Action for Sustainable Pastoralism, edited by Pedro Herrera Jonathan Davies, and Pablo Manzano Baena is freely available through the IUCN…
Elizabeth Gardiner was awarded a Borlaug Fellowship in Global Food Security ($29,323) to support her dissertation research in Burkina Faso on the impacts of land privatization on food security. The…
The fieldwork of our MORSL postdoctoral researchers is featured on the website of the Office of international Affairs.
Sarah Laborde, Department of Anthropology, and Sui Phang, Department of…
Pallavi Oruganti, an undergraduate researcher in our DECML lab is profiled on the Arts and Science College website.
Our review paper on models of foot-and-mouth disease was published online first in the journal Transboundary and Emerging Diseases. The lead author is Laura Pomeroy, a postdoctoral researcher in…
An NSF RAPID is supporting our research on the impact of refugee pastoralists from Nigeria on the pastoral ecosystem in the Logone Floodplain of Cameroon. Here is the summary from the NSF website…
A MORSL fieldwork photo by our postdoctoral researcher Sarah Laborde has won first prize in the COMPAS Sustainability Photo Contest.
Our paper Meta-studies in Land Use Science: Current Coverage and Prospects came out in Ambio. The paper came out of a workshop at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC…
Brandon Mohr, one of our undergraduate researchers in the MORSL lab, presented the findings of his study of depressions in the Logone Floodplain at the Fall Student Poster Forum, September 17,…
Ohio State researchers from veterinary medicine, geography, anthropology, environmental sciences and public health are using statistics and computer simulations, along with field research, to…
Our research team received an EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine the impact of the domestic cycle of households on the demography of family herds and ultimately on…
Our paper examining spatial and temporal characteristics of pastoral mobility has been published in PLoS ONE. Ningchuan Xiao, Shanshan Cai, Mark Moritz, Rebecca Garabed, Laura Pomeroy. 2015…
Congratulations to Chris for his award of a Mershon Center Student Research Grant. This funding will support his dissertation research on emergent forms of citizenship in Kumasi, Ghana. In…