Integrated modelling of social-ecological systems: The MAELIA high-resolution multi-agent platform to deal with water scarcity problems

Sustainable water resource management is typical of environmental management problems emerging from complex social-ecological systems. It deeply depends upon water user strategies, land use management and water governance systems. MAELIA, a "policy issue" modelling platform, allows performing integrated assessment at watershed level of a wide range of scenarios regarding water and land use management strategies in combination with global changes. It has been developed through a strong analysis of different French water management situations and an inductive modelling process. It allows representing dynamic interactions between human activities (farming practices), ecological processes (hydrology and crop growth), and governance systems (water regulations and releases from dams) at fine spatiotemporal resolutions in order to handle actual problems of water managers and issues of the main water users (farmers). MAELIA includes original farmer, dam manager and state services (software) agents