A Conceptual Model for Simulating Farmer Decisions and Land Use Change

Key Words: long term viability; human-landscape interaction; multi-agent based model; decision making. The development of many agricultural regions is uncertain due to current and future changes in economic, social and ecological factors and the complexity of human-landscape interactions. The largest impact on landscapes in agricultural regions is through land use by farmers. To study the long-term viability and possible emerging behaviour of an entire landscape including farmers, a conceptional model for the development of a multi-agent human-biophysical simulation model is introduced. The model integrates a domain model with three external individual biophysical, social an