Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Simulating Spatial Changes In Vegetation-Livestock Interactions Under Different Landscape Structures: A Multi-Agent System Applied To Agro-Pastoral Territories, Mamadou Sané, Jonathan Vayssières, Myriam Grillot, Alassane Bah, Alexandre Ickowicz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Free-range and common-grazing ruminants play a major role in the functioning and the provision of ecosystem services by agro- and silvo-pastoral ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. To assess how landscape structure affects the nature of environment-herd-services interactions, this paper describes a Multi-Agent System (MAS) that simulates daily herd movements in a dynamic environment. The model is used to study how the overall productivity of an agricultural territory is affected by the spatial organization of its different landscape units. The originality of this model lies in fine representation, in hourly time steps, of a herd’s movements and activities over the seasons depending …