The goal of the AG-Innovation agent-based model is to explore and compare the effects of two alternative mechanisms of innovation development and diffusion (exogenous, linear and endogenous, non-linear) on emergent properties of food and income distribution and adoption rates of different innovations. The model also assesses the range of conditions under which these two alternative mechanisms would be effective in improving food security and income inequality outcomes. Our modelling questions were: i) How do cross-scalar social-ecological interactions within agricultural innovation systems affect system outcomes of food security and income inequality? ii) Do foreign aid-driven exogenous innovation perpetuate income inequality and food insecurity and if so, under which conditions? iii) Do community-driven endogenous innovations improve food security and income inequality and if so, under which conditions? The Ag-Innovation model is intended to serve as a thinking tool for for the development and testing of hypotheses, generating an understanding of the behavior of agricultural innovation systems, and identifying conditions under which alternated innovation mechanisms would improve food security and income inequality outcomes.

The BASAR model aims to investigate different approaches to describe small-scale farmers’ decision-making in the context of diversified agroforestry adoption in rural Rwanda. Thereby, it compares random behaviour with perfect rationality (non-discounted and discounted utility maximization), bounded rationality (satisficing and fast and frugal decision tree heuristics), Theory of Planned Behaviour, and a probabilistic regression-based approach. It is aimed at policy-makers, extension agents, and cooperatives to better understand how rural farmers decide about implementing innovative agricultural practices such as agroforestry and at modelers to support them in selecting an approach to represent human decision-making in ABMs of Social-Ecological Systems. The overall objective is to identify a suitable approach to describe human decision-making and therefore improve forecasts of adoption rates and support the development and implementation of interventions that aim to raise low adoption rates.

ViSA simulates the decision behaviors of different stakeholders showing demands for ecosystem services (ESS) in agricultural landscape. The lack of sufficient supply of ESSs triggers stakeholders to apply different management options to increase their supply. However, while attempting to reduce the supply-demand gap, conflicts arise among stakeholders due to the tradeoff nature of some ESS. ViSA investigates conditions and scenarios that can minimize such supply-demand gap while reducing the risk of conflicts by suggesting different mixes of management options and decision rules.

FIBE represents a simple fishery model. Fish that reproduce and fisher with different fishing styles that fish as their main source of income. The aim of the model is to reflect the different fishing behaviours as described and observed in the (Swedish) Baltic Sea fishery and explore the consequences of different approximations of human/fisher behaviour in under different environmental and managerial scenarios.

The overarching aim is to advance the incorporation and understanding of human behaviour (diversity) in fisheries research and management. In particular focusing on insights from social (fishery) science of fisher behaviour.

The purpose of the model is to explore how processes associated with compliance across different fishery actors’ social groups interplay with their acceptance of a fishery intervention, herein periodic closures of a small-scale octopus fishery. The model agents, entities and processes are designed based on stylized facts from literature and expert workshops on periodic closures in the Western Indian Ocean region, as well as fieldwork from Zanzibari villages that have implemented periodic octopus closures. The model is designed for scientists and decision-makers that are interested in understanding the complex interplay between fishers from different social groups, herein foot fisher men, foot fisher women and male skin divers or free divers within the periodic closure of an octopus species. Including various actions resulting from the restrictions, that is - opportunities that may be presented from restricting fishing in certain areas and during certain times. We are soon publishing an updated model with individual octopuses and their movement behaviors.

At the heart of a study of Social-Ecological Systems, this model is built by coupling together two independently developed models of social and ecological phenomena. The social component of the model is an abstract model of interactions of a governing agent and several user agents, where the governing agent aims to promote a particular behavior among the user agents. The ecological model is a spatial model of spread of the Mountain Pine Beetle in the forests of British Columbia, Canada. The coupled model allowed us to simulate various hypothetical management scenarios in a context of forest insect infestations. The social and ecological components of this model are developed in two different environments. In order to establish the connection between those components, this model is equipped with a ‘FlipFlop’ - a structure of storage directories and communication protocols which allows each of the models to process its inputs, send an output message to the other, and/or wait for an input message from the other, when necessary. To see the publications associated with the social and ecological components of this coupled model please see the References section.

The purpose of this model is to understand the role of trade networks and their interaction with different fish resources, for fish provision. The model is developed based on a multi-methods approach, combining agent-based modeling, network analysis and qualitative data based on a small-scale fisheries study case. The model can be used to investigate both how trade network structures are embedded in a social-ecological context and the trade processes that occur within them, to analyze how they lead to emergent outcomes related to the resilience of fish provision. The model processes are informed by qualitative data analysis, and the social network analysis of an empirical fish trade network. The network analysis can be used to investigate diverse network structures to perform model experiments, and their influence on model outcomes.

The main outcomes we study are 1) the overexploitation of fish resources and 2) the availability and variability of fish provision to satisfy different market demands, and 3) individual traders’ fish supply at the micro-level. The model has two types of trader agents, seller and dealer. The model reveals that the characteristics of the trade networks, linked to different trader types (that have different roles in those networks), can affect the resilience of fish provision.

This model is based on the Narragansett Bay, RI recreational fishery. The two types of agents are piscivorous fish and fishers (shore and boat fishers are separate “breeds”). Each time step represents one week. Open season is weeks 1-26, assuming fishing occurs during half the year. At each weekly time step, fish agents grow, reproduce, and die. Fisher agents decide whether or not to fish based on their current satisfaction level, and those that do go fishing attempt to catch a fish. If they are successful, they decide whether to keep or release the fish. In our publication, this model was linked to an Ecopath with Ecosim food web model where the commercial harvest of forage fish affected the biomass of piscivorous fish - which then became the starting number of piscivorous fish for this ABM. The number of fish caught in a season of this ABM was converted to a fishing pressure and input back into the food web model.

AgentEx aims to advance understanding of group processes for sustainable management of a common pool resource (CPR). By supporting the development and test explanations of cooperation and sustainable exploitation.

This model examines how financial and social top-down interventions interplay with the internal self-organizing dynamics of a fishing community. The aim is to transform from hierarchical fishbuyer-fisher relationship into fishing cooperatives.