Agent-based modelling and assessment of human-environment interactions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Berger
• Subject Area: Soil Sciences
• Term: from 2008 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 82511281

A better understanding of human-environment interactions and especially of land users’ decision- making processes is a key requisite for exploring possible coping strategies to climate change and for improving land use planning. So far, land system models have focused on land areas as the main unit of analysis and have not represented the decision-making of land users explicitly. Within the second generation of land system models, attention will therefore shift from pixels to agents. When building so-called multi-agent models, the challenge becomes to realistically represent individual land-use decisions and especially the adaptation to climate change. Factors to be considered are options for technology adoption, learning and risk-coping, and spatial interaction. Another challenge is the integration of multi-agent models with land-surfaceatmosphere models and especially crop growth models at detailed spatial scales, which has not yet been achieved. The major scientific goal of this project is to develop the agent-based model component for the overall land system model. The project fulfills a linking role between the microeconomic modelling at the individual farm level and the biophysical modelling at the landscape level.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants