Lang, Railsback and Associates

Lang, Railsback & Associates

Consultants in natural resource modeling, research, and management

Arcata, California, USA

Phone and fax: (707) 822-0453

Who we are:

Margaret Lang is an environmental engineer specializing in environmental fluid mechanics, fish passage through hydraulic structures, hydrology, and contaminant fate and transfer in surface and ground water. She is on the faculty of the Environmental Resources Engineering Department at Humboldt State University.

Steve Railsback is an environmental engineer and ecologist specializing in modeling ecological systems, individual-based ecological modeling, and assessment of instream flow needs for river fish and ecosystems. He is an adjunct professor in the Mathematics Department and Environmental Systems Graduate program at Humboldt State University and previously was on the research staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Our associates include talented scientists and professionals with whom we contract as needed for projects. Associates have included software developers Colin Sheppard and Steve Jackson, environmental engineer and modeler Annjanette Dodd, ecologist Tamara Grand, John Kadvany of Policy and Decision Science, and field technicians.

We also have strong working relationships and a record of successful collaboration with a variety of agency and academic research groups. We have completed Research Joint Ventures with the US Forest Service's Pacific Southwest and Rocky Mountain research stations; and collaborate with scientists from (for example) the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research UFZ (Leipzig, Germany), the University of Bergen (Norway), Argonne National Laboratory, DePaul University, and University of California-Berkeley. Margaret and Steve have each advised a number of graduate students.

What we do:

Our mission at LRA is to provide quality basic and applied environmental research with high quality, focus, and productivity. Unlike many environmental consultants, we are experienced and skilled at research: developing and testing hypotheses and technologies to answer basic questions and solve management problems. Unlike many university researchers, we can often dedicate substantial time and resources to our clients' specific needs.

Additional information and related sites:

List of example LRA projects
Margaret Lang's home page at Humboldt State University
Resume of Steve Railsback (pdf)
Agent-based and Individual-based Modeling: A Practical Introduction, by Steve Railsback and Volker Grimm, 2012, Princeton University Press. This first textbook on individual-based modeling was based on our extensive experience teaching modeling and developing models.
Teaching Individual/Agent-based Modeling. The home page for a short course we conduct through Humboldt State's College of eLearning and Extended Education. The course is intended primarily for college-level instructors who want to teach their own courses using the Railsback and Grimm 2012 textbook.
Individual-based Modeling and Ecology, by Volker Grimm and Steve Railsback, 2005, Princeton University Press. This book is the first comprehensive monograph on how to build, use, and do science with individual-based or agent-based models.
Individual-based modeling and ecology at Humboldt State University. This site contains extensive information on individual-based modeling projects we have been major participants in, especially the inSTREAM model of instream flow and river management effects on trout populations. The site provides documentation, software, and publications from several major projects conducted in collaboration with Humboldt State's mathematical modeling program.
FishXing, the tool for modeling and analyzing fish passage through culverts and hydraulic structures. Margaret Lang is a key participant in the FishXing program.
www.swarm.org, the Swarm Development Group's agent-based modeling wiki. SDG is a non-profit organization that supports individual- and agent-based modeling and maintains Swarm software. Steve Railsback served on SDG's board of directors for many years.

Last updated: August 2015