This model is to explore the changes of paddy field landscape and household livelihood structure in the village under different policy scenarios, evaluate the eco-social effects of different policies, and provide decision support tools for proposing effective and feasible policies.

The basic idea behind developing MIXTRUST was to represent a network of agricultural stakeholders composed of farmers and a cooperative in a mixed landscape to test its performances in response to risks. A mixed landscape here is a landscape where crop and livestock systems interact by the intermediary of material flows of agricultural products. It can be within mixed farms, or between farms, often specialized, (e.g. straw-manure).

Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis is a recurrent theme in spatial archaeology. Based on a cost of movement image, the user can interpret how difficult it is to travel around in a landscape. This kind of analysis frequently uses GIS tools to assess different landscapes. This model incorporates some aspects of the LCP analysis based on GIS with the capabilities of agent-based modeling, such as the possibility to simulate random behavior when moving. In this model the agent will travel around the coastal landscape of Southern Brazil, assessing its path based on the different cost of travel through the patches. The agents represent shellmound builders (sambaquieiros), who will travel mainly through the use of canoes around the lagoons.

How it works?
When the simulation starts the hiker agent moves around the world, a representation of the lagoon landscape of the Santa Catarina state in Southern Brazil. The agent movement is based on the travel cost of each patch. This travel cost is taken from a cost surface raster created in ArcMap to represent the different cost of movement around the landscape. Each tick the agent will have a chance to select the best possible patch to move in its Field of View (FOV) that will take it towards its target destination. If it doesn’t select the best possible patch, it will randomly choose one of the patches to move in its FOV. The simulation stops when the hiker agent reaches the target destination. The elevation raster file and the cost surface map are based on a 1 Arc-second (30m) resolution SRTM image, scaled down 5 times. Each patch represents a square of 150m, with an area of 0,0225km². The dataset uses a UTM Sirgas 2000 22S projection system. There are four different cost functions available to use. They change the cost surface used by the hikers to navigate around the world.

A Picit Jeu is an agent-based model (ABM) developed as a supporting tool for a role-playing game of the same name. The game is intended for stakeholders involved in land management and fire prevention at a municipality level. It involves four different roles: farmers, forest technicians, municipal administrators and forest private owners. The model aims to show the long-term effects of their different choices about forest and pasture management on fire hazard, letting them test different management strategies in an economically constraining context. It also allows the players to explore different climatic and economic scenarios. A Picit Jeu ABM reproduces the ecological, social and economic characteristics and dynamics of an Alpine valley in north-west Italy. The model should reproduce a primary general pattern: the less players undertake landscape management actions, by thinning and cutting forests or grazing pastures, the higher the probability that a fire will burn a large area of land.

Agent-based models of organizational search have long investigated how exploitative and exploratory behaviors shape and affect performance on complex landscapes. To explore this further, we build a series of models where agents have different levels of expertise and cognitive capabilities, so they must rely on each other’s knowledge to navigate the landscape. Model A investigates performance results for efficient and inefficient networks. Building on Model B, it adds individual-level cognitive diversity and interaction based on knowledge similarity. Model C then explores the performance implications of coordination spaces. Results show that totally connected networks outperform both hierarchical and clustered network structures when there are clear signals to detect neighbor performance. However, this pattern is reversed when agents must rely on experiential search and follow a path-dependent exploration pattern.

ViSA 2.0.0 is an updated version of ViSA 1.0.0 aiming at integrating empirical data of a new use case that is much smaller than in the first version to include field scale analysis. Further, the code of the model is simplified to make the model easier and faster. Some features from the previous version have been removed.
It simulates decision behaviors of different stakeholders showing demands for ecosystem services (ESS) in agricultural landscape. It investigates conditions and scenarios that can increase the supply of ecosystem services while keeping the viability of the social system by suggesting different mixes of initial unit utilities and decision rules.

The model is intended to simulate visitor spatial and temporal dynamics, encompassing their numbers, activities, and distribution along a coastline influenced by beach landscape design. Our primary focus is understanding how the spatial distribution of services and recreational facilities (e.g., beach width, entrance location, recreational facilities, parking availability) impacts visitation density. Our focus is not on tracking the precise visitation density but rather on estimating the areas most affected by visitor activity. This comprehension allows for assessing the diverse influences of beach layouts on spatial visitor density and, consequently, on the landscape’s biophysical characteristics (e.g., vegetation, fauna, and sediment features).

This is a generic sub-model of animal territory formation. It is meant to be a reusable building block, but not in the plug-and-play sense, as amendments are likely to be needed depending on the species and region. The sub-model comprises a grid of cells, reprenting the landscape. Each cell has a “quality” value, which quantifies the amount of resources provided for a territory owner, for example a tiger. “Quality” could be prey density, shelter, or just space. Animals are located randomly in the landscape and add grid cells to their intial cell until the sum of the quality of all their cells meets their needs. If a potential new cell to be added is owned by another animal, competition takes place. The quality values are static, and the model does not include demography, i.e. mortality, mating, reproduction. Also, movement within a territory is not represented.

This is a model of plant communities in urban and suburban residential neighborhoods. These plant communities are of interest because they provide many benefits to human residents and also provide habitat for wildlife such as birds and pollinators. The model was designed to explore the social factors that create spatial patterns in biodiversity in yards and gardens. In particular, the model was originally developed to determine whether mimicry behaviors–-or neighbors copying each other’s yard design–-could produce observed spatial patterns in vegetation. Plant nurseries and socio-economic constraints were also added to the model as other potential sources of spatial patterns in plant communities.

The idea for the model was inspired by empirical patterns of spatial autocorrelation that have been observed in yard vegetation in Chicago, Illinois (USA), and other cities, where yards that are closer together are more similar than yards that are farther apart. The idea is further supported by literature that shows that people want their yards to fit into their neighborhood. Currently, the yard attribute of interest is the number of plant species, or species richness. Residents compare the richness of their yards to the richness of their neighbors’ yards. If a resident’s yard is too different from their neighbors, the resident will be unhappy and change their yard to make it more similar.

The model outputs information about the diversity and identity of plant species in each yard. This can be analyzed to look for spatial autocorrelation patterns in yard diversity and to explore relationships between mimicry behaviors, yard diversity, and larger scale diversity.

The HUMan impact on LANDscapes (HUMLAND) model has been developed to track and quantify the intensity of different impacts on landscapes at the continental level. This agent-based model focuses on determining the most influential factors in the transformation of interglacial vegetation with a specific emphasis on burning organized by hunter-gatherers. HUMLAND integrates various spatial datasets as input and target for the agent-based model results. Additionally, the simulation incorporates recently obtained continental-scale estimations of fire return intervals and the speed of vegetation regrowth. The obtained results include maps of possible scenarios of modified landscapes in the past and quantification of the impact of each agent, including climate, humans, megafauna, and natural fires.