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Scientific Research Documentation - An Information Server For The National Park Hunsrück-Hochwald, Peter Fischer-Stabel, Micheal Mattern

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Within the world network of nature reserves, a national park is a park in use for conservation purposes. Beside it´s high value for nature and biodiversity, national parks are serving as sites for research, environmental monitoring, education and training. In order to ensure a long-lasting, central and efficient access to the literature and data on such a nature reserve for all scientists from the respective institutions, a research information portal was established for the National Park Hunsrück-Hochwald. Based on a user requirements analysis, a client-server architecture using open source components was set up. Core modules are a metadata-management component and …

Evaluation Of Future Climate Change Impact On Aquatic Ecosystem And Health Using Lm3-Tan Model In South Korea, Jin Wan Lee, Chung Gil Jung, So Ra Ahn, Seong Joon Kim

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Climate change could be one of the main threats faced by aquatic ecosystems and freshwater biodiversity. Recently, LM3-TAN (Land Model 3 Terrestrial and Aquatic Nitrogen) land-based physical, biological, chemical processes model for South Korea was developed to assess the combined effects of direct human influences and future climate change on Aquatic Nitrogen cycling by Korea NIEL (National Institute of Environmental Research). The objective of this study is to analyse the relationship between stream water quality, water temperature, and Trophic Diatom Index (TDI) and Benthic Macroinvertebrate Index (BMI) determined by stream water quality factors. The TDI and BMI monitored 2 times …

Supporting Wildlife Conservation By Modelling The Effectiveness Of Community-Led Poacher Mitigation, Marit E. Kragt, Eric J. Hay, Micheal Renton

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Illegal hunting and poaching are severely threatening biodiversity in Southeast Asia, especially those species that are rare or threatened. Management strategies to address this poaching problem include wildlife patrols that collect and remove wire snares. While studies exist that predict the impact of poaching on biodiversity loss, there are few studies that evaluate the effectiveness of policy strategies. We present a model that predicts how community-led poaching mitigation patrols could help wildlife conservation the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR). The results show that, without intervention, nearly all species will be poached to local extinction over the next 10 years. We …

A Java Binary Tree Data Structure For Environmental Modelling, Francesco Serafin, Marialaura Bancheri, Riccardo Rigon, Olaf David

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The modelling of natural phenomena to solve a wide range of problems has increased in popularity in the last three decades. However, as the size and complexity of the source code of environmental models has grown, issues related to maintainability and further development have arisen. In this work, we show an innovative way to simplify the reuse and development of new models, decoupling the physics of the processes from the schematization of information flow and feedback. Each physical process (for instance, evapotranspiration or runoff production) might be implemented as a stand alone component for a framework like OMS v3, which …

A Novel Approach To Parameterizing Utility Functions For Agent-Based Market Models Of Resource Choice, Dawn Parker, Yu Huang, Robert Babin, Jeff Casello, Xiongbing Jin, Xinyue Pi, Veronica Sullivan

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Theoretical economic choice models posit that agents make resource allocation decisions based on the “utility,” or subjective satisfaction that they receive from alternative choices. Utility allows agents to rank choices and potentially apply optimization algorithms to these choices. Utility, however, is not measurable in an empirical context. Thus, modelers alternatively estimate linear empirical functions that associate factors with observed choices and/or market prices. While these linear functions can include factors that reflect multiple social and natural dimensions of decision making, they are not suitable for optimization (even using assumptions of bounded rationality) or for representing synergies and substitutability between factors. …

Employing State Of The Art Model Ensembles For Impact Assessment Of Air Pollution, Leif Vogel, Sérgio Faria, Joseph V. Spadaro, Anil Markandya

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Current annual global estimates of premature deaths from poor air quality are estimated in the range of 2.6-4.4 million, and 2050 projections are expected to double against 2010 levels. In Europe, annual economic burdens are estimated at around 750 bn €. Climate change will further exacerbate air pollution burdens; therefore, a better understanding of the economic impacts on human societies has become an area of intense investigation. European research efforts on the integration of Earth Observation data within modelling frameworks have been carried out within the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition & Climate (MACC) project series, running from 2005 till 2015. The …

Pynsim: An Open-Source Software Framework For Building Simulation Models Of Multi-Actor Resource Networks, Stephen Knox, Philipp Meier, Jim Yoon, Phil Selby, Christian Klassert, Julien Harou, Thibaut Lachaut, Nicolas Avisse, Amaury Tilmant, Steve Gorelick

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Simulation of engineered resource systems is increasingly expected to represent the actions of multiple actors, from individual agents who manage one site to institutions that manage complex interactions within the resource system. These models often incorporate multiple components, which need to be integrated into a single computing context. In order to achieve such integration, a common semantic connection must be defined. We focus on systems such as water resources where a network of nodes and links can be used to represent the system. We present Pynsim, an open-source python simulation framework. In a Pynsim simulation, multiple model developers can contribute …

Simulating Regional-Scale Soil Nitrous Oxide Emissions In Scotland, Vasileios Myrgiotis, Cairistiona F. E. Topp, Robert M. Rees, Mathew Williams

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a major greenhouse gas whose largest anthropogenic source is the addition of nitrogenous fertilisers to cultivated soils. The development and application of mechanistic models of soil biogeochemistry contributes significantly to the effort to understand and quantify those N2O fluxes. Soil biogeochemistry models are complex and can be particularly difficult to evaluate because N2O measurements are usually sporadic and contain large uncertainties. Therefore, large-scale simulations with such models can be demanding. The majority of model-based studies focus on small spatial scales (i.e. field, catchment) despite the fact that simulations at larger scales are those that offer more …

Re-Examining The Abm Empirical Toolkit In A World Of Big (Behavioral) Data, Andrew Bell

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Robinson et al. (2007) identify five key modes of informing agent-based models (ABM): surveys, participant observation, field and lab experiments, companion modeling, and remotely-sensed data. Janssen and Ostrom (2006) hone in on some of the key dimensions that differentiate these approaches and the kinds of inferences that can be made from them, including the depth of capturing cognitive processes, the number of repeated observations made, and the size of the sample. A decade of technological change has occurred since these reviews were prepared, with mobile technologies in particular breaking down barriers to the scale and scope with which behavioral data …

Livelihoods Of Local Communities In An Amazonian Floodplain Coping With Global Changes: From Role-Playing Games To Hybrid Simulations To Involve Local Stakeholders In Participatory Foresight Study At Territorial Level, Pierre Biommel, Marie-Paule Bonnet, Emilie Coudel, Eva Haentjens, Cleber Nunes Kraus, Gustavo Melo, Stephanie Nasuti, Christophe Le Page

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the Amazonian floodplains, the local populations living from agricultural activities and fishing, have always coped natural variations, between flood and dry seasons. However, the rhythm and the amplitude of these floods are disturbed nowadays, resulting in great uncertainty for these populations. Biophysics and social scientists have joined hands to help these populations better improve their resilience to such changes. Our initial goal aims to better understand and discuss the impacts of current practices in the long term. To address this, we first turned the perspective around the preoccupations and strategies of local populations and collectively discussed possible future scenarios. …

A Multicriteria Assessment Method To Compare Scenarios Of Water Management In Agricultural Landscapes, Sandrine Allain, Gaël Plumecocq, Delphine Leenhardt

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the Aveyron watershed (South-Western France), where the agricultural economy mainly relies on irrigated productions (maize and fruits), engaging changes in quantitative water management is socially challenging. The watershed suffers from a structural misbalance between the water demand and the water offer, and recurring crises in the low-flow period lead to emergency restrictions of use. This situation tenses competing stakeholder positions and erodes the social-ecological system’s resilience.Characterizing and valuing options for change can support decision-making. Nonetheless, the various expert assessments that flourished as answers to political incentives for a better management of watershed did not succeed in bringing out socially-accepted …

Using Scenario Analysis To Investigate Uncertainty In Water Resource Management, Baihua Fu, Joseph Guillaume, Mike Asher, Tony Jakeman

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Water resource management is a challenging task due to the complexity and uncertainty of the environmental systems and challenges of addressing multiple stakeholder perspectives. A crucial issue is therefore in specifically understanding if and how we can make decisions under such deep uncertainty.

We examined this issue in a case study which estimates groundwater sustainability, farm profit and ecological outcomes of many drivers (e.g. climate change, water policy, farm practices). An integrated model was developed for this purpose. It encompasses a surface and groundwater model, water allocation rules, a farm decision and crop model and an ecology model. Scenarios were …

Coupling Biophysical And Socioeconomic Models: Assessing The Consequences Of Conservation Policies On Smallholder Livelihoods In The Atlantic Rainforest (Brazil), L. C. Munari, C. Troost, C. Marohn, C. Adams, A. Ribeiro-Filho, G. Cadisch, T. Berger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Shifting cultivation is among the most typical agricultural practices of smallholders in the forest-agriculture frontiers around the tropics. Shifting cultivation depends on long fallow periods to recover vegetation, soil structure and fertility. However, different socioeconomic, geographic and political drivers are transforming the system in many places, inducing land use/land cover changes. In the Ribeira River Valley (southeastern Brazil), nature conservation policies have additionally constrained shifting cultivation, claiming it is a major driver of deforestation on one of the most important Atlantic Rainforest remnants. Smallholders practicing shifting cultivation there have intensified commercial relations, have become increasingly dependent on the market for …

Αir Quality In Urban Areas: Urban Air Pollutants, Combined Exposure Management And Planning, Christos Vlachokostas, Nicolas Moussiopoulos

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The “urban climate” is characterized by numerous environmental pressures such as air and noise pollution, toxic substances or radiation which give justifiable rise to citizens’ worries about possible impacts on public health. The effort to close the loop between health stressors in urban areas is scientifically of major importance and should be brought forward. This paper supports this initiative and presents an integrated exposure assessment for Thessaloniki, Greece. The approach is based on the application of the Combined Environmental Stressors’ Exposure (CENSE) tool. The area under consideration is a densely populated urban environment and presents high levels of environmental health …

Challenges For Involving Water Stakeholders In Educational And Decision-Making Participatory Processes Supported By Abm, Pável Bautista Solís, Camille Belmin, Grégoire Leclerc, Martine Antona, Ricardo Morataya, Pierre Bommel

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We implemented a participatory process with water stakeholders for improving resilience to drought at watershed scale, and for reducing water pollution disputes in drought prone areas. The purpose is to facilitate participatory decision making in a rural watershed impacted by recurrent droughts related to ENSO in Northwestern Costa Rica. The process involved co-designing “ContaMiCuenca”, a hybrid agent-based model, as a mediation object. We followed a Companion Modeling approach and organized 6 workshops that included research techniques such as participatory diagnostics, ARDI diagrams (actor-resources-interaction), agent-based model design and interactive simulation sessions. We collectively assessed the main water issues in …

Agent-Based Modeling Automated: Data-Driven Generation Of Innovation Diffusion Models, Thorben Jensen, Émile J.L. Chappin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Simulation modeling is useful to gain insights into driving mechanisms of diffusion of innovations. This study aims to introduce automation to make identification of such mechanisms with agent-based simulation modeling less costly in time and labor. We present a novel automation procedure in which the generation of diffusion models is automated. It comprises three phases: (1) preprocessing of empirical data on the diffusion of a specific innovation, taken out be the user; (2) automated inverse modeling of decision models from a decision model library for their capability of explaining these data; (3) policy simulation automatically assesses user-chosen policy interventions in …

An Integrated Modelling Approach For Analyzing The Land-Use Effects Of German Bioenergy Policies, Rüdiger Schaldach, Daniela Thrän, Verena Wolf, Jan Schüngel, Markus Millinger, Klaus Hennenberg, Martin Banse

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The use of energy carriers derived from biomass is an essential element of the German strategy for transforming its energy system towards renewable energy sources. In order to assess the sustainability of the related biomass production it is important to analyze the environmental impacts of land-use change both domestically and in biomass exporting regions. For this purpose the MILESTONE modelling framework has been developed. It integrates a national bioenergy model (BENSIM) with a global economic model (MAGNET) and a global land-use model (LandSHIFT). The presentation concentrates on the linkage between MAGNET and LandSHIFT which represent the global land-use system within …

Explicit Cost Accounting For Adaptation, Mitigation And Ecosystem Service Provision In Agriculture, Franz Sinabell, Karin Heinschink, Christoph Tribl

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Farmers, policy makers and scientists are well aware of this problem: obtaining sound cost information for climate change adaptation and mitigation measures in agriculture or ecosystem service provision by agriculture is burdensome. In most cases, data sets are developed for a specific region with a given set of management variants for a baseline period. Adapting such information to another region or adjusting costs to expected future price scenarios requires additional efforts and frequently done an ad-hoc and case by case. A new tool is presented that can be used to identify and analyze the entangled effects of future climate and …

Futures Of Resilience And Mitigation: Combining Stakeholder Knowledge, Statistical Analysis And Integrated Modelling To Better Understand And Reduce Disaster Risk, Graeme A. Riddell, Hedwig Van Delden, Holger R. Maier, Aaron C. Zecchin, Graeme C. Dandy

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Characterising disaster risk involves a complex interaction of physical and social sciences, which makes planning for its reduction significantly challenging. The impact of disasters however make the need to deal with these complexities and uncertainties significant. A common approach to dealing with problems with great uncertainty and complexity is participatory development and application of exploratory scenarios which involve both qualitative and quantitative information. Scenarios developed for the Greater Adelaide region of South Australia, Australia, involved a diverse group of stakeholders involved in natural hazards planning and response. The development and use of exploratory scenarios to assist in decision making was …

Integrated Assessment Of Novel Two-Season Production Systems In Mato Grosso, Brazil, Marcelo Moraes, Affonso Libera, Evgeny Latynskiy, Anna Hampf, José Maria Silveira, Thomas Berger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

One of the most significant advantages of growing crops in Mato Grosso (in mid-western Brazil) is that farmers can grow two crops (in some specific cases even three) in the same season. From an economic point of view, on the one hand, this provides a strong comparative advantage. On the other hand, this increases the number of decision variables that a decision making agent has to take into account. The agricultural production planning is complex and dynamic and it needs to consider crop rotation/succession in accordance with annual variability of climatic conditions. We developed a region-specific bio-economic micro-simulation model in …

A Workflow To Model Microbial Loadings In Watersheds, Kurt Wolfe, Rajbir Parmar, Gene Whelan, Gerard F. Laniak, Mike Galvin, Keewook Kim, Marirosa Molina, Richard Zepp, Paul Duda, Dennis D. Keiser

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Many watershed models simulate overland and instream microbial fate and transport, but few actually provide loading rates on land surfaces and point sources to the water body network. This paper describes the underlying general equations for microbial loading rates associated with 1) land- applied manure on undeveloped areas from domestic animals; 2) direct shedding on undeveloped lands by domestic animals and wildlife; 3) urban or engineered areas; and 4) point sources that directly discharge to streams from septic systems and shedding by domestic animals. A microbial source module, which houses these formulations, is linked within a workflow containing eight models …

Climate Change Impacts On The Water Resources Of The Garonne River Watershed: A Blue And Green Water Approach, Youen Grusson, José Miguel Sanchez Perez, Sabine Sauvage, François Anctil

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Most of the modeling works on the impact of climatic change in hydrology focus on overland flows or, less frequently, on aquifer recharge. This study proposes to takes into consideration the largest part of the water cycle as possible, applying the recent concept of integrated water resources management which divides water resources into two classes: green and blue waters. Blue water groups all resources “usable” by society, such as groundwater or stream flow. The green water is by default “unusable”, mainly soil water content and evapotranspiration (ET). The SWAT model was operated at the Garonne catchment scale (50 000 km …

Keeping An Equilibrium: Harmonizing Environmental And Socio-Economic Water Demands In The Tagus River Headwaters Under Climatic Change, Anastasia Lobanova, Stefan Liersch, David Tabara, Hagen Koch, Valentina Krysanova, Fred Hattermann

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The main challenge for sustainable river management is the harmonization of the natural dynamics of water systems to ensure ecological integrity with the dynamics imposed by socio-economic systems and policy goals. The headwaters of the Tagus River basin provide an excellent example of strongly altered human-hydrological systems. The natural strong seasonality of river flows have been utterly transformed into a constant flow rate throughout the year to serve the vigorously expanding water demands imposed by hydropower and agricultural production in the region as well as by the transfer to the Segura catchment. This water management scheme has triggered serious societal …

The Pasture Simulation Model – Evaluation Of Plant Acclimatory Effects On Grassland Systems In France, Serge Zaka, Renáta Sándor, Raphaël Martin, Gaëtan Louarn, Katja Klumpp, David Borras, Gianni Bellocchi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The temperature responses of plant photosynthesis and respiration observed on single-plant species can be assumed to occur at the scale of a grassland ecosystem (which is a dynamic and competitive associations of plants). Based on the model for a single, fully expanded leaf as derived from experimental evidence and to gain insights into acclimatory and modulatory effects of growth temperature, we have: 1) improved a complex soil-vegetation-management model of grasslands, PaSim (Pasture Simulation model), and 2) evaluated it on multi-year datasets of plant biomass and C-water- energy fluxes in managed grassland systems. Illustrative results are presented for the French grassland …

Context Scenarios: Understanding Societal Context Uncertainty In Environmental Modeling, Hannah Kosow, Sigrid Prehofer, Wolfgang Weimer-Jehle

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We propose the context scenario approach to better deal with the uncertainty of future developments of socio-technical and socio-environmental systems. This approach goes beyond the established practice of environmental modeling. This practice consists in either using quantitative framework data on future societal developments (as e.g. GDP, population growth etc.) to drive model based environmental scenarios, or in combining intuitive storylines on societal futures with environmental simulation (SAS, Alcamo 2008). Instead, we use a qualitative but systematic form of systems analysis (cross-impact balance analysis CIB, Weimer-Jehle 2006) and combine it with modeling and simulation to construct integrated scenarios of socio-technical and …

Using Tethys Portal To Deploy Water Data Visualization And Analysis Web Apps For The U.S. National Water Center, Sarva Teja Pulla, Daniel P. Ames, Jim Nelson

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Tethys Platform is an open source web application (app) development environment built using the Django Python framework. Tethys is specifically intended for developing and hosting water resources-related web applications. Our experience shows that Tethys significantly lowers the barrier for cloud-based app development, simplifies the process of accessing scalable distributed cloud computing resources and leverages additional software for data and computationally intensive modelling. The Tethys software development kit allows users to create web apps for visualizing, analyzing and modelling hydrologic data. Several Tethys web applications have been created in collaboration with the U.S. National Water Center (NWC) to support their new …

Socio-Ecological Context Typology To Support Targeting And Upscaling Of Sustainable Land Management Practices In Diverse Global Dryland, Quang Bao Le, Chandrashekhar Biradar, Richard Thomas, Claudio Zucca, Enrico Bonaiuti

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

It is widely recognized that sustainable land management practices (SLM) are much needed for improving land-based livelihoods of 2.5 billion people living in the dry areas across the globe. Adoption and effectiveness of SLM depend on specific contexts. The high contextual diversity over global drylands makes (1) uniform blanket policies promoting SLM less effective and (2) the synthesis and upscaling of site-based successful lessons difficult. We propose the functional context type (FCT) approach to overcome these challenges by grouping common biophysical, economic and social drivers of land use adoption and change into distinct context types that shape SLM adoption and …

Intake Fraction And Burden Of Disease Due To Multiple Air Pollutants In A Warsaw Agglomeration, Poland, Piotr Holnicki, Marko Tainio, Andrzej Kałuszko, Zbigniew Nahorski

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Adverse health effects are the most important consequences of air pollution and therefore necessary to be considered in the IAM applications. Urban areas are especially important for such calculations because air pollution can potentially influence a large number of inhabitants. The high spatial variation in both emissions sources and population requires that such calculations are done with high space resolution. In this study, we quantify health burden due to local air pollution in the urban area for the Warsaw Agglomeration, Poland. From different air pollutants we considered particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) …

How Complicated Agent-Based Models Should Be?, Zhanli Sun, Carsten Buchmann

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly used to model human-environmental systems, in particular in natural resource management. The decision-making of agents is the core of ABMs. However, the human decision-making can be very complicated—influenced by various factors, such as personality, education, natural endowment, financial status; various theories from physiological, social, or economic perspectives have been employed to describe and explain human behaviours. One of the most puzzling question for ABMs and their modellers is how realistic and detailed the agents need to be modelled to catch the complexity of the human decision-making, while keeping the model simple and tractable. There are …

Integrating Scientific Knowledge, Data And Stakeholder Perceptions For Decision Support, Jean-Luc De Kok, Peter Viaene, Karolien Vermeiren, Maarten Van Der Meulen, Rachel Tiller, Murat Ardelan, Jennifer Bailey, Robert Thorpe, Jonathan Beecham, Sonja Van Leeuwen, Frede Thingstad, Tatiana Margo Tsagaraki, Russell Richards, Can Bizsel, Hugo Salgado

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

the marine food web is considered to be a factor of key importance for the global carbon balance. The concept of the ‘Biological Pump’ refers to the mechanism by which CO2 fixed by photosynthesis is transferred to the deep ocean through biologically-driven processes, resulting in sequestration of carbon for a period of decades or longer. Stressors affecting the efficiency of the biological pump include water column stability, sea temperature, acidity, excessive nutrients inputs, overfishing, pollution and other anthropogenic changes. The aim of the EU-FP7 project OCEAN- CERTAIN is to reduce the uncertainties in our understanding of the impacts of these …