{LIEB}t Team: Landscape · Institution · Environment · Behaviour — over deep time
Reading the co-evolution of people and nature through water
English | 中文
The {LIEB}t Team is an interdisciplinary research group led by Dr. Shuang Song (宋爽), based at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. We study four coupled components — Landscape, Institution, Environment and Behaviour — whose interactions only become meaningful when read along a temporal dimension, t. Water is our empirical entry point, the clearest place to watch these terms bind together:
- Landscape — a whole configuration of environmental and institutional conditions as registered in one mind; not the same landscape for differently situated people
- Institution — what may be done, settled before what is preferred: formal rules and informal norms alike
- Environment — follows physical law, out of reach of any single act, reshaped only by collective action — which has usually had to pass through institutions to be assembled
- Behaviour — where the loop closes: responses to landscape, aggregated into institutional change or acting on the environment direct
- t — not a fifth component, but the dimension the other four are read along
Note
The braces are the argument. L, I, E and B are not four independent variables to regress against one another; they are a mutually constituting set, with no causal chain to be traversed in order. The subscript t is the second half: none of these processes is instantaneous, each coupling runs on its own characteristic timescale, and we mean to keep those timescales explicit rather than collapse them into a single slice.
Each direction works one edge of the framework:
- 🌊 Water governance — E ↔ I: how is water governance linked to, and changed by, environmental change?
- 💬 Collective behaviour — I ↔ B: how do collective behaviours emerge, and how are they regulated by institutions?
- 🧠 Perception & expectation — L ↔ B: how do perceived environmental changes shape human behaviour?
- 🗺️ Topophilia (planned) — E ↔ L: how do humans embed in, and impact on, nature through a "sense of place"?
- 📜 History & archaeology — t: long-term perspectives brought to bear on all of the above
Current Focus: Yellow River Basin, China — one of the world's most anthropogenically altered large river systems
Methods earn their place by making one part of the coupling computable:
- Agent-based modelling — from individual rules to collective regularity, and back
- Geospatial & landscape analysis — GIS and remote sensing, to make landscape measurable
- Quantitative & statistical analysis — hydrological, socio-economic and survey data
- Historical & archaeological records — the only record long enough to watch slow processes run to completion
# 🤖 What we work with — and what we look for in new members
Core: Python
Data Analysis: Xarray, Pandas (or Polars), Numpy, Scipy
Modeling: Agent-based models, or any quantitative modelling expertise
Geospatial: GIS basics
Other strengths: GitHub, AI, Chinese history / Neolithic archaeologyAgent-Based Social-Ecological Systems Modeling Framework in Python
A powerful open-source framework that makes it easier to build artificial social-ecological systems with real geospatial datasets and fully incorporate human behavior.
Human-Water System Analysis and its visualization.
Coupling human and natural system studies to support sustainability in one of the world's most complex river systems. Checkout my publications on this topic.
Academic Note-Taking Workflow
An Obsidian-based workflow designed for researchers to manage academic literature and knowledge. This is a non-academic project, and I am the founder. We are recruiting new members, please get in touch if you are interested in workflow, knowledge management, and research coordination.
We welcome collaboration from scholars and students across diverse disciplines:
- 🌍 Geography - Physical & Human Geography, Hydrology
- 📚 History - Historical Geography, Environmental History
- 💻 Computer Science - Computational Modeling, Data Science, AI Agents
- 🧠 Socio-psychology - Environmental Sociology, Behavioral Science, Decision-Making
We offer fully remote positions! If you're passionate about interdisciplinary research at the intersection of society and environment, we'd love to hear from you. Short-term visits to the Max Planck Institute and informal joint supervision of domestic students are possible.
- 📖 Publications: Full publication list
- 📘 Documentation: Check individual project repositories for detailed docs
- 🎓 Academic CV: Detailed CV
- 📧 Contact: song@gea.mpg.de
- 📅 Book a Meeting: Schedule an appointment
- Research Lead: Dr. Shuang Song (宋爽)
- Email: song@gea.mpg.de
- Location: Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
- Schedule: Book an online meeting
"Using computational approaches to understand the past, present, and future of human-nature interactions"
Interested in collaboration? We'd love to hear from you!