Michael Barton

My interests center around long-term human ecology and landscape dynamics with ongoing projects in the Mediterranean (late Pleistocene through mid-Holocene) and American Southwest (Holocene-Archaic). He has done fieldwork in Spain, Bosnia, and various locales in North America and has expertise in hunter/gatherer and early farming societies, geoarchaeology, lithic technology, and evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on human/environmental interaction, landscape dynamics, and techno-economic change. Quantitative methods, increasingly critical to archaeological research and social science in general, and are an important focus of his research, especially emphasizing computational modeling, spatial technologies (including GIS and remote sensing), data science, and visualization.

I am a member of the open source GRASS GIS international development team that is making cutting edge spatial technologies available to researchers and students around the world. I also maintain the GRASS apps for the Macintosh platform. 

The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics project, which I direct, combines computational modeling and interdisciplinary fieldwork to study the emergence of coupled human and natural landscapes, and  long-term interactions of agricultural land-use practices and landscape change in the ancient Mediterranean, with support from the National Science Biocomplexity in the Environment and Coupled Natural and Human Systems programs.

I am the Executive Director of the Open Modeling Foundation, an international consortium supporting community standards for computational modeling across the social, environmental, ecological, and geophysical sciences. 

I also direct the CoMSES Network, an international research network and NSF Big Data Spoke facility to promote open science, knowledge sharing, reproducibility, and best practices in emerging cybertools in the socio-ecological sciences.

I also collaborate on research to better understand the feedbacks between people and climate at regional to global scales.