The purpose of the presented ABM is to explore how system resilience is affected by external disturbances and internal dynamics by using the stylized model of an agricultural land use system.

We explore land system resilience with a stylized land use model in which agents’ land use activities are affected by external shocks, agent interactions, and endogenous feedbacks. External shocks are designed as yield loss in crops, which is ubiquitous in almost every land use system where perturbations can occur due to e.g. extreme weather conditions or diseases. Agent interactions are designed as the transfer of buffer capacity from farmers who can and are willing to provide help to other farmers within their social network. For endogenous feedbacks, we consider land use as an economic activity which is regulated by markets — an increase in crop production results in lower price (a negative feedback) and an agglomeration of a land use results in lower production costs for the land use type (a positive feedback).

This study investigates a possible nexus between inter-group competition and intra-group cooperation, which may be called “tribalism.” Building upon previous studies demonstrating a relationship between the environment and social relations, the present research incorporates a social-ecological model as a mediating factor connecting both individuals and communities to the environment. Cyclical and non-cyclical fluctuation in a simple, two-resource ecology drive agents to adopt either “go-it-alone” or group-based survival strategies via evolutionary selection. Novelly, this simulation employs a multilevel selection model allowing group-level dynamics to exert downward selective pressures on individuals’ propensity to cooperate within groups. Results suggest that cooperation and inter-group conflict are co-evolved in a triadic relationship with the environment. Resource scarcity increases inter-group competition, especially when resources are clustered as opposed to widely distributed. Moreover, the tactical advantage of cooperation in the securing of clustered resources enhanced selective pressure on cooperation, even if that implies increased individual mortality for the most altruistic warriors. Troubling, these results suggest that extreme weather, possibly as a result of climate change, could exacerbate conflict in sensitive, weather-dependent social-ecologies—especially places like the Horn of Africa where ecologically sensitive economic modalities overlap with high-levels of diversity and the wide-availability of small arms. As well, global development and foreign aid strategists should consider how plans may increase the value of particular locations where community resources are built or aid is distributed, potentially instigating tribal conflict. In sum, these factors, interacting with pre-existing social dynamics dynamics, may heighten inter-ethnic or tribal conflict in pluralistic but otherwise peaceful communities.

For special issue submission in JASSS.

This work is a java implementation of a study of the viability of a population submitted to floods. The population derives some benefit from living in a certain environment. However, in this environment, floods can occur and cause damage. An individual protection measure can be adopted by those who wish and have the means to do so. The protection measure reduces the damage in case of a flood. However, the effectiveness of this measure deteriorates over time. Individual motivation to adopt this measure is boosted by the occurrence of a flood. Moreover, the public authorities can encourage the population to adopt this measure by carrying out information campaigns, but this comes at a cost. People’s decisions are modelled based on the Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers1975, Rogers 1997, Maddux1983) arguing that the motivation to protect themselves depends on their perception of risk, their capacity to cope with risk and their socio-demographic characteristics.
While the control designing proper informations campaigns to remain viable every time is computed in the work presented in https://www.comses.net/codebases/e5c17b1f-0121-4461-9ae2-919b6fe27cc4/releases/1.0.0/, the aim of the present work is to produce maps of probable viability in case the serie of upcoming floods is unknown as well as much of the parameters for the population dynamics. These maps are bi-dimensional, based on the value of known parameters: the current average wealth of the population and their actual or possible future annual revenues.

The model objective’s is to explore the management choice set to uncover which subsets of strategies are most effective at maximizing species coexistence on a fragmented landscape.

REHAB has been designed as an ice-breaker in courses dealing with ecosystem management and participatory modelling. It helps introducing the two main tools used by the Companion Modelling approach, namely role-playing games and agent-based models.

This model explores a social mechanism that links the reversal of the gender gap in education with changing patterns in relative divorce risks in 12 European countries.

The objective of the model is to evaluate the impact of seasonal forecasts on a farmer’s net agricultural income when their crop choices have different and variable costs and returns.

This generic agent-based model simulates the evolution of agent’s opinions through their exchange of arguments.
The idea behind this model is to explicitly represent the process of mental deliberation of agents from arguments to an opinion, through the use of Dung’s argumentation framework complemented by a structured description of arguments. An application of the model on the diffusion of vegetarian diets is proposed.

The three-day participatory workshop organized by the TISSS Lab had 20 participants who were academics in different career stages ranging from university student to professor. For each of the five games, the participants had to move between tables according to some pre-specified rules. After the workshop both the participant’s perception of the games’ complexities and the participants’ satisfaction with the games were recorded.

In order to obtain additional objective measures for the games’ complexities, these games were also simulated using this simulation model here. Therefore, the simulation model is an as-accurate-as-possible reproduction of the workshop games: it has 20 participants moving between 5 different tables. The rules that specify who moves when vary from game to game. Just to get an idea, Game 3 has the rule: “move if you’re sitting next to someone who is waring white or no socks”.

An exact description of the workshop games and the associated simulation models can be found in the paper “The relation between perceived complexity and happiness with decision situations: searching for objective measures in social simulation games”.

This model is an implementation of a predator-prey simulation using NetLogo programming language. It simulates the interaction between fish, lionfish, and zooplankton. Fish and lionfish are both represented as turtles, and they have their own energy level. In this simulation, lionfish eat fish, and fish eat zooplankton. Zooplankton are represented as green patches on the NetLogo world. Lionfish and fish can reproduce and gain energy by eating other turtles or zooplankton.

This model was created to help undergraduate students understand how simulation models might be helpful in addressing complex environmental problems. In this case, students were asked to use this model to make predictions about how the introduction of lionfish (considered an invasive species in some places) might alter the ecosystem.