A High Resolution Multi-Agent System for Simulation of Land-Use/Cover Changes

Understanding the dynamics of land-use/cover change (LUCC) and the associated driving forces is vital to design appropriate policies for sustainable management of land and water resources and to analyze their impacts.

A key scientific challenge for achieving these aims is to capture the complexities of coupled human-environment processes with a long-term perspective.

Multi-agent simulation is capable of modeling the complex behavior of land-use changes as it mimics causal mechanisms, feedback loops, and interactions within the human-landscape system. Scientists at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) have developed GV-LUDAS, a spatially explicit multi-agent simulation model, to simulate land/water-use change and the interrelated socio-economic dynamics at the community-catchment scale.

The natural landscape was modeled in the form of landscape agents, i.e., land units that host natural processes and change their nature in response to local conditions exerting influence on each land unit and its immediate neighbourhood. Major ecological models (e.g. soil erosion and crop production models) have been integrated into the structure of landscape agents. The human community was represented by heterogeneous decision-making agents that integrate household, environmental and policy information into land-use decisions.
A multi-agent based protocol was designed to coordinate the flexible interactions among human and landscape agents, and to monitor the consequent land-use changes and associated socio-economic dynamics.

The model captures the most important aspects of the structural complexity of the coupled human-environment system by integrating several micro dynamic models into the structures of household and landscape agents. Moreover, the model is able to systematically generate spatio-temporally explicit land-use change scenarios and the related socio-economic dynamics resulting from land/water-use policy interventions. Because of the complexity of land- and water-use dynamics and high risks/uncertainty associated with long-term perspectives in sustainable resource management, the model can be used to derive plausible spectrum of management options instead of straightforward prediction of LUCC.

The GV-LUDAS model has been empirically parameterized and calibrated for selected catchments in the Upper-East Region of Ghana and South-West Burkina Faso. Participatory policy analyses have identified relevant development/policy options in land and water management, including cotton cultivation, building small dams, and credit schemes for dry season farming. GV-LUDAS enables stakeholders to project land-use and associated socio-economic changes under different policy scenarios (i.e., what-if questions), thereby providing a scientific basis to evaluate the consequences of different policy interventions. GV-LUDAS thus can serve as a scientific reasoning tool to support sustainable management of land and water resources in Volta Basin.

Research team members: Quang Bao Le (team leader), Julia Schindler, Katrin Gleisberg, Wolfram Laube, Lulseged Desta, Paul L.G. Vlek

Related publications:
Le, Q.B., Park, S.J., Vlek, P.L.G., Cremers, A.B. (2008). Land-use dynamic simulator (LUDAS): A multi-agent system model for simulating spatio-temporal dynamics of coupled human-landscape system. I. Structure and theoretical specification. Ecological Informatics, 135 – 153.

Schindler, J. (in preparation). A Multi-Agent System for Simulating Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in the Atankwidi Catchment of Upper East Ghana. Ecology and Development Series, Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn.