Investigating Impacts of Alternative Crop Market Scenarios on Land Use Change with an Agent-Based Model

Ding, Deng; Bennett, David A.; Secchi, Silvia

doi:10.3390/land4041110

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Conversely, many models that attempt to address local and regional drivers of land-use change neglect to capture macroscale climatic or socioeconomic driving forces (Verburg et al 2004;Rounsevell et al 2012). For example, agent-based models (based on modeling land-use decision-making of various entities) have also been used to address land-use change at local and regional scales (Berger 2001;Brady et al 2012;Ding et al 2015), but they rarely account for macroscale driving forces, including climate change. Similarly, econometric models have been widely used within the U.S. to project regional-scale land use based on concepts of optimizing economic return (Murray et al 2005;Lubowski et al 2006;Radeloff et al 2012), yet these too often neglect the impacts of climate change.…”

Section: Land-use Projectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes

et al. 2017

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Half of Earth's land surface has been altered by human activities, creating various consequences on the climate and weather systems at local to global scales, which in turn affect a myriad of land surface processes and the adaptation behaviors. This study reviews the status and major knowledge gaps in the interactions of land and atmospheric changes and present 11 grand challenge areas for the scientific research and adaptation community in the coming decade. These land-cover and land-use change (LCLUC)-related areas include 1) impacts on weather and climate, 2) carbon and other biogeochemical cycles, 3) biospheric emissions, 4) the water cycle, 5) agriculture, 6) urbanization, 7) acclimation of biogeochemical processes to climate change, 8) plant migration, 9) land-use projections, 10) model and data uncertainties, and, finally, 11) adaptation strategies. Numerous studies have demonstrated the effects of LCLUC on local to global climate and weather systems, but these putative effects vary greatly in magnitude and even sign across space, time, and scale and thus remain highly uncertain. At the same time, many challenges exist toward improved understanding of the consequences of atmospheric and climate change on land process dynamics and services. Future effort must improve the understanding of the scale-dependent, multifaceted perturbations and feedbacks between land and climate changes in both reality and models. To this end, one critical cross-disciplinary need is to systematically quantify and better understand measurement and model uncertainties. Finally, LCLUC mitigation and adaptation assessments must be strengthened to identify implementation barriers, evaluate and prioritize opportunities, and examine how decisionmaking processes work in specific contexts.

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Section: Land-use Projectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes

et al. 2017

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“…Similarly, flows of materials are often represented implicitly as the result of interactions between agents due to their behaviours. For instance, trade transactions produce flows of materials from one agent to another, e.g., [64], and human-environment flows are implicitly represented through agent activities such as harvesting and fertiliser application, e.g., [65]. Finally, P/GE models do not explicitly represent the flows of materials, and instead implicit flows of products between producers and consumers are determined due to supply and demand.…”

Section: Comparison: Assumptions and Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Modelling Approaches for Understanding Telecoupling: Global Food Trade and Local Land Use

Millington

Xiong

Peterson

et al. 2017

Land

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Abstract:The telecoupling framework is an integrated concept that emphasises socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant places. Viewed through the lens of the telecoupling framework, land use and food consumption are linked across local to global scales by decision-making agents and trade flows. Quantitatively modelling the dynamics of telecoupled systems like this could be achieved using numerous different modelling approaches. For example, previous approaches to modelling global food trade have often used partial equilibrium economic models, whereas recent approaches to representing local land use decision-making have widely used agent-based modelling. System dynamics models are well established for representing aggregated flows and stores of products and values between distant locations. We argue that hybrid computational models will be useful for capitalising on the strengths these different modelling approaches each have for representing the various concepts in the telecoupling framework. However, integrating multiple modelling approaches into hybrid models faces challenges, including data requirements and uncertainty assessment. To help guide the development of hybrid models for investigating sustainability through the telecoupling framework here we examine important representational and modelling considerations in the context of global food trade and local land use. We report on the development of our own model that incorporates multiple modelling approaches in a modular approach to negotiate the trade-offs between ideal representation and modelling resource constraints. In this initial modelling our focus is on land use and food trade in and between USA, China and Brazil, but also accounting for the rest of the world. We discuss the challenges of integrating multiple modelling approaches to enable analysis of agents, flows, and feedbacks in the telecoupled system. Our analysis indicates differences in representation of agency are possible and should be expected in integrated models. Questions about telecoupling dynamics should be the primary driver in selecting modelling approaches, tempered by resource availability. There is also a need to identify appropriate modelling assessment and analysis tools and learn from their application in other domains.

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“…One or more fields comprise a farm, and each farm is managed by a farmer agent. Data on farmer location, tenure, and farm characteristics (e.g., crop history, field size) were used to generate a statistically representative arrangement of farms and farmer agents on the landscape to maintain subject anonymity (Ding et al 2015). At each annual time step, farmer agents make land use decisions according to prescribed decision rules.…”

Section: The Coupled Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We used the Clear Creek Watershed (CCW), a highly instrumented and well-monitored watershed in east-central Iowa (Muste et al 2013, Ding et al 2015, Schilling et al 2015, to represent an agricultural production system that is typical of the Midwestern United States, explore human-environment interactions, and test scenarios under the resilience framework. The current state of this SES is a landscape dominated by intensive agriculture that is focused on corn and soybean production, the functions and outputs of which are vital to the economic health and cultural identity of the region.…”

Section: System Of Interestmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing stability landscapes to identify alternative states in coupled social-ecological agent-based models

Bitterman¹,

Bennett²

2016

E&S

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ABSTRACT. The resilience of a social-ecological system is measured by its ability to retain core functionality when subjected to perturbation. Resilience is contextually dependent on the state of system components, the complex interactions among these components, and the timing, location, and magnitude of perturbations. The stability landscape concept provides a useful framework for considering resilience within the specified context of a particular social-ecological system but has proven difficult to operationalize. This difficulty stems largely from the complex, multidimensional nature of the systems of interest and uncertainty in system response. Agent-based models are an effective methodology for understanding how cross-scale processes within and across social and ecological domains contribute to overall system resilience. We present the results of a stylized model of agricultural land use in a small watershed that is typical of the Midwestern United States. The spatially explicit model couples land use, biophysical models, and economic drivers with an agent-based model to explore the effects of perturbations and policy adaptations on system outcomes. By applying the coupled modeling approach within the resilience and stability landscape frameworks, we (1) estimate the sensitivity of the system to contextspecific perturbations, (2) determine potential outcomes of those perturbations, (3) identify possible alternative states within state space, (4) evaluate the resilience of system states, and (5) characterize changes in system-scale resilience brought on by changes in individual land use decisions.

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Investigating Impacts of Alternative Crop Market Scenarios on Land Use Change with an Agent-Based Model

Cited by 14 publications

References 41 publications

Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes

Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes

Integrating Modelling Approaches for Understanding Telecoupling: Global Food Trade and Local Land Use

Constructing stability landscapes to identify alternative states in coupled social-ecological agent-based models

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