TITLE:
An Agent-Based Assessment of Land Use and Ecosystem Changes in Traditional Agricultural Landscape of Portugal
AUTHORS:
Lilibeth A. Acosta, Mark D. A. Rounsevell, Martha Bakker, Ann Van Doorn, Montserrat Gómez-Delgado, Marc Delgado
KEYWORDS:
Abandonment; Agent-Based Model; Cluster Analysis; Ecosystem and Biodiversity; Land Use Change; Logistic Regression; Portugal; Scenario Analysis; Traditional Agricultural Landscape
JOURNAL NAME:
Intelligent Information Management,
Vol.6 No.2,
March
28,
2014
ABSTRACT: This paper presents an assessment of land use changes and
their impacts on the ecosystem in the Montado, a
traditional agricultural landscape of Portugal in response to global
environmental change. The assessment uses an agent-based model (ABM) of the adaptive decisions of farmers to simulate the
influence on future land use patterns of socio-economic attributes such as
social relationships and farmer reliance on subsidies and biophysical
constraints. The application and development of the ABM are supported empirically
using three categories of input data: 1) farmer types based on a cluster
analysis of socio-economic attributes; 2) agricultural suitability based on
regression analysis of historical land use maps and biophysical attributes; and
3) future trends in the economic and climatic environments based on the A1fi
scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Model sensitivity
and uncertainty analyses are carried out prior to the scenario analysis in
order to verify the absence of systematic errors in the model structure. The
results of the scenario analysis show that the area of Montado declines
significantly by 2050, but it remains the dominant land use in the case study
area, indicating some resilience to change. An important policy challenge
arising from this assessment is how to encourage next generation of innovative
farmers to conserve this traditional landscape for social and ecological
values.