Jasper van Vliet is researcher at the Amsterdam Global Change Institute (AGCI) where he works on land change in general and agricultural land change in Europe in particular. Educated in Wageningen he has a background in geography with specializations in GIS and spatial modeling. His approach is mainly quantitative as applies a various models in his studies for the analysis of land change as well as for foresight studies. These models include spatially-explicit land-change models and agent based models, as he believes they best represent spatial variability and actor behavior, which eventually drive many land changes.