Roberto Interdonato

Research Scientist
CIRAD - UMR TETIS
Montpellier, France

Member of the EVERGREEN INRIA team-project

Participant in the MOOD H2020 project

mail : roberto dot interdonato at cirad dot fr

Curriculum Vitae

Latest News

General Chair of:

ASONAM 2024

The 16th International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 

September 2 -  5, 2024

Calabria, Italy

General Chair of:

FRCCS 2024

French Regional Conference on Complex Systems

May 29 - 31, 2024, Montpellier, France

Recent Publications

The new abnormal: Identifying and ranking anomalies in the land trade marketLarge-scale national and transnational commercial land transactions, or Large-Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs), have been gaining a lot of academic attention since the late 2000s and since the reported rush for land, resulting in turn from an increase in demand for arable land. If many data exist to characterize land deals, the analysis of investment networks remain limited and predominantly portrays power asymmetries between countries from the Global North investing in the Global South. The aim of this work is to perform a deeper investigation on the land trade market, specifically focusing on cases that do not follow such narratives. For instance, almost 25% of the countries included in the transnational land trade network do not follow a strict investor/target dichotomy, thus being characterized by a double role, i.e., they both acquire and cede land in the transnational context. In order to globally acknowledge for what was currently considered as abnormal cases, we model open access data about LSLAs extracted from the Land Matrix Initiative (LMI) open-access database into a network graph, and adapt an eigenvector based centrality method originally conceived for online social networks, namely LurkerRank, to identify and rank anomalous profiles in the land trade market. We take into account three different network snapshots: a multi-sector network (including all the transnational deals in the LMI database), and three networks referring to specific investment sectors (agriculture,mines and biofuels). Experimental results show that emerging economies (e.g., China and Malaysia) play a central role in the land trade market, by creating alternative dynamics that escape the classic North/South one. Our analyses also show how African countries that are often seen as targets of land trade transactions in a specific sector, may often acquire foreign land in the context of investments in the same sector (i.e., Zimbabwe for biofuels and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the mining sector).

Community Detection in Multiplex Networks


A multiplex network models different modes of interaction among same-type entities. In this article, we provide a taxonomy of community detection algorithms in multiplex networks. 

The parable of arable land: Characterizing large scale land acquisitions through network analysisLand is a scarce resource and its depletion is related to a combination of demographic and economic factors. Hence, the changes in dietary habits and increase in world population that upturn the food demand, are intertwined with a context of increasing oil prices and rise of green capitalism that in turn impacts the demand in biofuel. A visible indicator of these phenomena is the increase, in recent years, of Large Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs) by private companies or states. Such land investments often lead to conflicts with local population and have raised issues regarding people’s rights, the role of different production models and land governance. The aim of this work is to show how publicly available data about LSLAs can be modeled into complex network structures, thus showing how the application of advanced network analysis techniques can be used to better understand land trade dynamics. We use data collected by the Land Matrix Initiative on LSLAs to model three land trade networks: a multi-sector network, a network centered on the mining sector and a network centered on the agriculture one. Then we provide an extended analysis of such networks which includes: (i) a structural analysis, (ii) the definition of a score, namely LSLA-score, which allows to rank the countries based on their investing/target role in the land trade network, (iii) an analysis of the land trade context which takes into account the LSLA-score ranking and the correlation between network features and several country development indicators, (iv) an analysis centered on the discover and analysis of network motifs (i.e., recurring patterns in the land trade network), which provides insights into complex and diverse relations between countries. Our analyses showed how the land trade market is massively characterized by a Global North-Global South dynamic, even if the investing power of emerging economies also has a major impact in creating relations between different sub-regions of the world. Moreover, the analyses on the mining and agriculture sectors highlighted how the role of several countries in the trade network may drastically change depending of the investment sector, showing diverse hierarchies between investor, intermediate and target countries.