The purpose of this model is to project the dynamics of technology adoption of autonomous weeding robots by sugar beet producing farmers in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Moreover, the design of the model serves the purpose to investigate second-order effects of robot adoption on shifts in farm income and on production quantities of main crops produced in North Rhine-Westphalia. One aim is to analyse the impact of technology attributes and costs of pesticides on adoption patterns.

Studies of colonization processes in past human societies often use a standard population model in which population is represented as a single quantity. Real populations in these processes, however, are structured with internal classes or stages, and classes are sometimes created based on social differentiation. In this present work, information about the colonization of old Providence Island was used to create an agent-based model of the colonization process in a heterogeneous environment for a population with social differentiation. Agents were socially divided into two classes and modeled with dissimilar spatial clustering preferences. The model and simulations assessed the importance of gregarious behavior for colonization processes conducted in heterogeneous environments by socially-differentiated populations. Results suggest that in these conditions, the colonization process starts with an agent cluster in the largest and most suitable area. The spatial distribution of agents maintained a tendency toward randomness as simulation time increased, even when gregariousness values increased. The most conspicuous effects in agent clustering were produced by the initial conditions and behavioral adaptations that increased the agent capacity to access more resources and the likelihood of gregariousness. The approach presented here could be used to analyze past human colonization events or support long-term conceptual design of future human colonization processes with small social formations into unfamiliar and uninhabited environments.

The Rigor and Transparency Reporting Standard (RAT-RS) is a tool to improve the documentation of data use in Agent-Based Modelling. Following the development of reporting standards for models themselves, attention to empirical models has now reached a stage where these standards need to take equally effective account of data use (which until now has tended to be an afterthought to model description). It is particularly important that a standard should allow the reporting of the different uses to which data may be put (specification, calibration and validation), but also that it should be compatible with the integration of different kinds of data (for example statistical, qualitative, ethnographic and experimental) sometimes known as mixed methods research.

For the full details on the RAT-RS, please refer to the related publication “RAT-RS: A Reporting Standard for Improving the Documentation of Data Use in Agent-Based Modelling” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2022.2049511).

Here we provide supplementary material for this article, consisting of a RAT-RS user guide and RAT-RS templates.

Our model allows simulating repeated conservation auctions in low-income countries. It is designed to assess policy-making by exploring the extent to which non-targeted repeated auctions can provide biodiversity conservation cost-effectively, while alleviating poverty. Targeting landholders in order to integrate both goals is claimed to be overambitious and underachieving because of the trade-offs they imply. The simulations offer insight on the possible outcomes that can derive from implementing conservation auctions in low-income countries, where landholders are likely to be risk averse and to face uncertainty.

The Sediba socio-ecolgoical rangeland model is an biomass growth model coupled with a social model of pastoralist behaviour in a commmon pool resource setting. The social subsystem is an empircal ABM.

This agent-based model simulates the diffusion of a social change process stratified by social class in space and time which is solely driven social and spatial variation in communication links.