Characterising Land Holding Size Distributions in a Forest Reserve

This paper intends to characterise the land holding distributions in a Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS) model inspired by the Caparo Forest Reserve, in Venezuela. This forest has been highly intervened with and seriously altered by opportunistic, nomadic, land-seeking colonists. The distribution of land holding results from a process of land encroachment, allowed by a weak state showing ambiguous behaviour and regulations, permitting the rise of a land market in the forest area. A thorough understanding of this process is achieved by, first, modelling and simulating individual landowner's decision-making regarding land occupation, and secondly, characterising the collective land occupation process in the simulation model. The size distribution of land holding appears to be exponential rather than power law, as was initially expected. The paper not only explores whether leptokurtic distributions emerge in this complex social environment but also tries to identify the specific mechanisms and model assumptions that lead to these sorts of distributions, instead of alternative ones. Additionally, this paper relates these mechanisms to market structures and interactions, in order to give the results a richer real-world interpretation.