Computer Engineering Commons^™

Paper And Pebbles Simulations And Modelling For The Governance Of Socio-Environmental Systems: A Review Of 8 Years Of Experimenting With The Wat-Agame Toolkit, Géraldine Abrami, Nils Ferrand, Raphaele Ducrot, Sylvie Morardet, Emeline Hassenforder, Patrice Garin, Bruno Bonté, Patrice Robin, Wanda Aquae-Gaudi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Wat-A-Game (WAG) is an open toolkit and a method based on simple bricks for designing and using participatory simulations (i.e. role playing games) for water management, policy design and education. It is included in a more extensive package of integrated methods and tools, called CoOPLAaGE, targeting the main needs and steps in the multilevel decision and management process.

The main principle of WAG is to use pebbles to show explicitly how water (and other resources) flows, and are transformed and used, and different paper elements and cards to represent space, activities and rules (Abrami et al, 2012; Ferrand et al, …

Analysing The Error Potential Of Administrative Data In Determining The Sinuosity Of Small Rivers, Pierre Karrasch, Sebastian Hunger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

According to the European Water Framework Directive the member states are committed to prove the good ecological status of all water bodies. These requirements are verified by a regular monitoring. Especially the use of remote sensing data and methods of applied geoinformatics and statistics can be recommended for the monitoring of several hydromorphological parameters. At the same time for some single parameters basic geodata provided by local authorities are available (e.g. river centrelines). In this study the quality of these basic geodata is compared with self-extracted results using different remote sensing data sources (CIR-orthophoto, digital terrain model). The results reveal …

Artificial Intelligence Techniques To Enhance Actors’ Decision Strategies In Socio-­Ecological Agent-­ Based Models, Shaheen A. Abdulkareem, Ellen-­Wien Augustijn-­Beckers, Yaseen T. Mustafa, Tatiana Filatova

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agent-­Based Models (ABMs) are indispensable to studying the aggregated impacts of individual actions of heterogeneous interacting adaptive agents. Concurrently, artificial intelligence has been employed for decades to simulate autonomous actions of individual entities that react, learn and exchange information with an environment and one another. There are obvious synergies between the two computational approaches. For example, artificial intelligence is often used to enhance agents’ behaviour in ABMs. Artificial intelligence learning algorithms (AILAs) allow for a richer agents’ architecture for operationalization of more realistic learning decisions beyond a simplistic treatment of agents’ cognitive and sensory capacities. Firstly, we review recent socio-­economic …

Experimental Measurement Of Stakeholder Expectation Formation And Risk Taking Behaviour For Integrated Regional Agricultural Land Use Modelling, Marius Eisele, Christian Troost, Thomas Berger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Understanding how stakeholders respond to climate signals, form expectations about the future and adapt behaviour under uncertainty is crucial for simulating land use change in integrated assessment models. Traditional economic models of expectation formation assume rational or quasi- rational patterns of expectation formation and have typically been derived in the context of price expectations. Approaches for modelling decisions under uncertainty typically either follow the paradigms of (subjective) expected utility maximization or prospect theory.

These approaches however may not fit to the analysis of climate change responses due to ambiguous climate signals, a long time span of change, and the significance …

Gis Mash-Ups In The Cloud: Visualizing Online Data Using Hydroshare And Tethys Platform, Daniel P. Ames, Shawn Crawley, Zhiyu Li

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

HydroShare is a web based data management system for climate and water data that is includes a web-services application programmer interface (API) to allow third party programmers to access and use its open data resources. To provide end users with data analysis and visualization tools for HydroShare resources, we have implemented an online web app development system called Tethys Platform and have developed several apps that utilize the HydroShare API. Tethys Platform is an open source software package based on the Django framework and Python programming language. The Tethys software development kit allows users to create web apps for visualizing, …

Effects Of Climate Data Aggregation On Regional Net Primary Production (Npp) Modelling, Matthias Kuhnert, Jagadeesh Yeluripati, Pete Smith, Holger Hoffmann, Marcel Van Oijen, Julie Constantin, Elsa Coucheney, Rene Dechow, Henrik Eckersten, Thomas Gaiser, Balász Grosz, Edwin Haas, Kurt-Christian Kersebaum, Ralf Kiese, Steffen Klatt, Elisabet Lewan, Claas Nendel, Helene Raynal, Carmen Sosa, Xenia Specka, Edmar Teixeira, Enli Wang, Lutz Weihermüller, Gang Zhao, Zhigan Zhao, Stephen Ogle, Frank Ewert

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In ecosystem modelling studies, data are often collected at a small scale but are used in models to predict ecosystem responses e.g. net primary production (NPP) at coarser scale, using data aggregation. The data aggregation causes errors that are difficult to predict, because of model complexity and our limited knowledge of the spatial heterogeneity underlying our aggregated input values. Input aggregation thus adds to the uncertainty associated with model predictions. One way of reducing uncertainty related to input aggregation error is to evaluate models at different resolutions for areas where high-resolution input data are available. The objective of this study …

Climate Change Impacts And Implications: An Integrated Assessment In A Lowland Environment Of New Zealand, A. G.E. Ausseil, K. Bodmin, A. Daigneault, E. Teixeira, E. D. Keller, M. U. F. Kirschbaum, L. Timar, A. Dunningham, C. Zammit, S. Stephens, M. Cameron, P. Blackett, G. Harmsworth, B. Frame, A. Reisinger, A. Tait, D. Rutledge

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

New Zealand’s mixed economy includes a range of sectors (e.g. primary production, energy, tourism) that depend heavily on the state of natural resource capital. This makes the economy heavily dependent on future global climate change and the global economic situation. In this paper, we present a framework to evaluate socio-economic and environmental impacts of future climate and land-use change, and give results for one scenario in a typical lowland environment in New Zealand. The future scenario was designed as a combination of global climate and socio-economic assumptions, along with New Zealand-specific policy assumptions. We evaluated the impacts and implications of …

Water Resource Management With The Management Software Manuela, Monika Von Haaren

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The impact of climate change with increasing droughts will lead to an increase of water consumption in agriculture. Even in Germany, agricultural land is already irrigated intensively to secure harvests at a higher level. The demand for additional irrigation will lead to conflicts between agriculture, water management and nature conservation. This paper shows a new way for the evaluation of water use in agricultural farming. With the developed method stakeholder can assess the water consumption for irrigation in agriculture, which is transferable, regionally applicable and comparable. The water-module is available as a new plug-in in the management software MANUELA and …

Modelling Adaptive Behaviour In Spatial Agent-­Based Models: Coastal Cities And Climate Change, Tatiana Filatova, Erik Horstman, Suzanne J.M.H. Hulscher, Ju-­Sung Lee, Johan De Waard

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A major part of world population lives in coastal and delta areas threatened by adverse consequences of climate change (increasing probabilities or severity of floods and hurricanes). It might lead to a forced displacement of up to 187 million people in coastal zones. Still, exposure and vulnerability in coastal areas rapidly escalate due to the clustering of population and growth of property values in flood-­prone areas. Land markets driven by individual location preferences are crucial in the formation of spatial patterns of activities and the economic value they receive. Under the conditions of uncertainty where probabilistic disasters and rich amenities …

Assessing Crop Portfolios: Diversification Versus Monoculture For Biodiesel, G. Guariso, F. Recanati

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The selection of crop patterns for agricultural areas is usually guided by the maximization of expected income. This variable is, however, influenced by the fluctuations of both crop productivity and prices. The annual variability is directly related to the risk of a crop portfolio and, according to the so called Modern Theory Portfolio (MTP), it is a fundamental aspect to be taken into account during the selection of crops. This is true especially in case of those farmers who are not wealthy. Crop diversification is considered an effective solution able to alleviate the abovementioned inter-annual fluctuations and to guarantee a …

Design And Implementation Of Hydrologic Model Sharing Capabilities Within The Cuahsi Hydroshare System, Mohamed M. Morsy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Anthony M. Castronova, Pabitra Dash, Brian Miles, Venkatesh Merwade, Jeffrey M. Sadler, David G. Tarboton

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

HydroShare is an online repository tailored for the hydrology community and designed to facilitate collaboration and open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and models to enable model reuse, and research reproducibility. In HydroShare data, models and their input and output files are considered as objects of collaboration, or social objects. Collectively these are referred to as "Resources" and HydroShare supports a number of resource types each designed to represent a specific hydrologic data type or model. Each resource type includes a metadata profile that describes key attributes of that resource. This research focuses on the resource types and metadata …

Web Portal For Corporate Sustainability Evaluation, Modelling And Benchmarking, Oldřich Faldík, Jiří Hřebíček, Oldřich Trenz, Edward Kasem

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The ability of a company to maintain productivity over time and thus retain the potential of profitability and stability to the long-term is termed sustainability. The appropriate combination of sustainability indicators from a number of different fields, such as economic, social, environmental and corporate governance, is maintained during this period. In conjunction with the support of corporate reporting, it is a powerful tool that companies use to endorse internal environmental and financial reporting, distribution of descriptive information about the company into its surroundings, and a way to follow Key Performance Indicators. The aim of this paper is to present the …

Modelling Potential Nitrogen Losses In Oil Palm Plantations With In-Palm, An Agri-Environmental Indicator, Pardon Lénaïc, Bockstaller Christian, Marichal Raphaël, Sionita Ribka, Nelson Paul, Gabrielle Benoît, Jean-Paul Laclau, Caliman Jean-Pierre, Bessou Cécile

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Oil palm cultivation area is expected to increase until at least 2050. This expansion raises environmental concerns, not only regarding land-use change and its consequences, but also concerning potential impacts of losses of nitrogen such as ammonia volatilisation, nitrous oxide emission and nitrate leaching and runoff. The prerequisite to any work on the reduction of losses and identification of best practices is the development of an assessment tool. However, the available knowledge regarding nitrogen losses is limited for oil palm, which leads to high uncertainty in environmental assessment.

In this context, we chose to develop an agri-environmental indicator, IN-Palm, which …

The Role Of Subjective Risk Perceptions In Shaping Coastal Development Dynamics, Nicholas R. Magliocca, Virginia Mcconnell, Margaret Walls

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In highly dynamic socio-environmental systems, particularly those affected by frequent natural hazards, the ways in which people perceive their environment, formulate expectations of risk, and make decisions influence the long-term vulnerability of the built landscape to natural hazards. A common observation in landscapes prone to natural hazards, such as flooding and/or hurricanes, is the emergence of overly reactive (i.e., out-of-equilibrium, or ‘boom-bust’ cycles) market dynamics. Housing prices and insurance uptake rates have been shown to decline and spike, respectively, immediately after hazard events and then return to long-term trends as time since the event increases. Theoretical explanations for such dynamics …

Groundwater Recharge And Associated Uncertainty Estimation Combining Multi-Method And Multi-Scale Approaches, S. Lanini, Y. Caballero

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Groundwater resource assessment is a major concern for water managers who have to balance water demands and resources at a basin or territory scale. One operational way to address this question is to estimate the part of recharge which is linked to precipitation. Many methods to estimate groundwater recharge are described in the literature, varying in terms of time scale and the nature of the data they treat. They do not always provide a suitable estimate of uncertainty. To obtain both a realistic estimation of groundwater recharge and a confidence interval at the hydrogeological basin scale, we propose a multi-method …

Hydroshare: Promoting Collaborative Publication, Interoperability, And Reuse Of Hydrologic Data And Research Products, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, David G. Tarboton, Ray Idaszak, Dan P. Ames, Jonathan L. Goodall, Venkatesh Merwade, Alva Couch, Richard P. Hooper, Pabitra Dash, Michael J. Stealey, Hong Yi, Tian Gan, Anthony M. Castronova, Brian Miles, Zhiyu Li, Mohamed M. Morsy

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Data and models used within the hydrologic science community are diverse. New research data and model repositories have succeeded in making data and models more accessible, but are, in most cases, limited to particular types or classes of data or models and also lack the type of collaborative, and iterative functionality needed to enable shared data collection and modeling workflows. File sharing systems currently used within many scientific communities for private sharing of preliminary and intermediate data and modeling products do not support collaborative data capture, description, visualization, and annotation. This presentation will cast hydrologic datasets and models as “social …

How To Couple Ecological Database To Geochemical Dynamic Model To Predict The Impact Of Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition And Climate Change On French Forest Ecosystems At The National Scale?, S. Rizzetto, J. -.C Gégout, S. Belyazid, E. Kuhn, H. Sverdrup, A. Probst

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Nitrogen atmospheric deposition is known to severely impact ecosystem functioning by influencing soil biogeochemistry, nutrients balance and, consequently, tree growth, forest health and biodiversity. Because the ongoing global changes affect the ecosystem processes, climate change and atmospheric deposition must be conjointly taken into account to assess the evolution of forest ecosystem status over time. The general purpose of this work was to predict forest vegetation response to the combined impacts of nitrogen atmospheric deposition and climate change by using dynamic modelling approaches. The coupled biogeochemical-ecological model ForSAFE-Veg was first run to simulate this response on three well referenced studied sites …

An Agent-Based Model For Studying The Effects Of Sustainable Intensification On Food Security In The Nation State, James Reilly, Terry Dawson, Robin Matthews, Gary Polhill, Pete Smith

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Growth in World’s population, the expansion of human activities and the demand for land has and continues to damage the natural environment. Humans depend on the natural environment for essential life-preserving processes, for example food production. Damage to the environment has serious consequences for national (State) and human security and well-being. One concern is food security and, in particular, whether a growing World population will find enough food to eat. The consequences of using more land and resources to grow more food are an important area of research. The expansion of farming will leave less land for other important uses. …

Uncertainty Analysis Toward Confidence Limits To Hydraulic State Predictions In Water Distribution Networks, Mathias Braun, Olivier Piller, Angelo Iollo, Iraj Mortazavi, Jochen Deuerlein

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Calculating the hydraulic state, through and across elements such as pipes, valves and control devices is an important task in managing a water distribution network. Although hydraulic models are widely used by water utilities and engineers, they are governed by a huge number of uncertain parameters like the diameter and roughness of pipes, consumer demands, leakages and the internal state of valves inside the distribution network. In the past, extensive work has been done on the calibration of these parameters but the results are still uncertain. The objective of the research done as part of the French-German project ResiWater is …

Using Web Content For Informing Water Management In Snow-Dominated Catchments, M. Giuliani, R. Fedorov, A. Castelleti, P. Fraternali

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Snow accumulation and melting are fundamental components of the hydrologic cycle in many water systems across the world. In such contexts, improving snow monitoring can be extremely valuable in a variety of operational contexts, such as avalanche protection, medium to long-term streamflow forecast, and drought risk management. Despite recent advances in environmental monitoring systems, continuous snow monitoring systems able to collect data at high spatial and temporal resolution are not well established yet. The unprecedented availability of user generated data on the Web is opening new opportunities for enhancing real-time monitoring and modeling of environmental systems based on data that …

A Multipurpose Soil Inorganic Carbon Prediction Model, Ben W. Kolosz, Peter Manning, Jorat M. Ehsan, Saran P. Sohi, David A.C. Manning

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

There is a lack of models to predict soil inorganic carbon (SIC) which are not only multipurpose, but can predict SIC in a variety of soils and materials. The importance of estimating SIC stocks is due to the large contribution they make towards total carbon in some soils. This paper proposes such a model which aims to account for the variance and geographical range of soils. As an example, one such use is the accurate prediction of passive SIC sequestration rates as this is currently a complex challenge, mainly due to environmental effects such as water, temperature and atmospheric CO …

Sensitivity Analysis In Support To Drinking Water Production Plants Optimization, Florin Capitanescu, Antonino Marvuglia, Enrico Benetto, Aras Ahmadi, Ligia Tiruta-Barna

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In the frameworks of environmental management and computational sustainability, this paper aims at improving, in a cost-effective manner, the sustainability of existing drinking water production plants (DWPPs) via multi-objective constrained optimization (MOO). Specifically, the paper explores the ability of global sensitivity analysis (SA) methods to support MOO of DWPPs by means of a quick identification of a subset of the most sensitive decision variables from a large set, which leads to better quality solutions under limited time budget. To this end, the paper conducts a comparative analysis for this MOO problem of two major SA methods, namely Morris and Sobol’, …

Residual Soil Nitrogen Scenario Analysis Of Canadian Farmland Using A Canadian Agricultural Nitrogen Budget (Canb V4.0) Model, Jingyi Yang, Craig Drury

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A Canadian Agricultural Nitrogen Budget (CANB) model has been developed since 2002 to estimate Residual Soil Nitrogen (RSN) and N leaching loss across Canadian farmland. The current results showed that national RSN averages in Canadian farmland (annual N input minus annual N output) increased from 9.4 kg N ha-1 in 1981 to 23.6 kg N ha-1 in 2011 as mainly affected by the increase in synthetic fertilizer N usage and biological N2 fixation. With annual drainage, about 50 and 80% of residual soil N was lost in Central (Ontario and Quebec) and Atlantic Canada, respectively, through leaching and varying according …

Watershed And Economic Data Interoperability (Wedo) System, Rajbir Parmar, John M. Johnston, Mike Galvin, Amber Ignatius, Catherine Foley

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Hydrologic modeling is essential for environmental, economic, and human health decision- making. However, sharing of modeling studies is limited within the watershed modeling community. Distribution of hydrologic modeling research typically involves publishing summarized data in peer reviewed journals, producing reports, or presenting at conferences. This narrow data distribution process limits interoperability, decreases transparency, wastes leveraging potential, and discourages detailed evaluation by other modelers. These limitations are also experienced beyond hydrologic modeling. For example, an economic analysis for nutrient trading may not be possible without access to detailed hydrologic modeling data. To address these issues, the Watershed and Economic Data InterOperability …

Sustainable Collective Pest Management Using A Graph-Based Markov Decision Processes Framework, Jean-Noël Aubertot, Marie-Josée Cros, Nathalie Peyrard, Régis Sabbadin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

For environmental, ecological and human health sustainability, there is a great need to limit the structural dependency of agriculture on pesticides while, at the same time, maintaining satisfactory levels of production and farmers’ gross margins. A model was developed to explore the consequences of various management policies to contain blackleg on canola, on a long term basis. This model relies on the Graph-based Markov Decision Processes (GMDP) framework, that allows representing and optimizing sequential decisions under uncertainty, taking into account interactions between fields (spore dispersal). The objective of the study is to help better enforce management practices such as cultivar …

Integrating Human Agency And Ecosystem Services: An Abm Perspective On Food, Stefano Balbi, Ferdinando Villa

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Food is a primary provisioning ecosystem service. The concept of ecosystem services only focuses on the flow of services from nature to humans and doesn’t consider human flows, which include both the flows from human to nature (i.e. the co-production of ecosystem services or environmental pressures caused by humans) and human to human flows (i.e. social flows). Neglecting human flows is a main issue for modelling food provision within the ecosystem services framework, especially so under a food security perspective, where food access greatly depend on economic entitlements and social networks. We use the example of food security to provide …

The European Information Platform For Chemical Monitoring (Ipchem) - How Can You Realize Interoperability?, Gerlinde Knetsch, Maria Ruether

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Monitoring programs in Germany offer a large variety of data. On the one hand, these data are generated over many years in selected sampling areas; on the other hand, studies of monitoring take place in the context of research projects or other investigations. These data are often available in web-based information systems. Two databases will be presented with their potential for the interoperability with a (technical) platform for data of the chemical monitoring. The European project "Information Platform for Chemical Monitoring (IPCheM)" promotes networking of various existing databases and information systems with the goal of advancing the environmental data exchange …

A Decision Support Tool (R-Swat-Ds) For Integrated Watershed Management, Angel Udías, Anna Malago, Marco Pastori, Olga Vigiak, Arnauld Reynaud, Francisco Javier Elorza, Faycal Bouraoui

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Best management practices (BMPs) can be used effectively to reduce nutrient and sediment loads generated from point sources or non-point sources to receiving water bodies. Methodologies for optimal, cost effective BMP selection and placement are needed to assist watershed management planners and stakeholders. We developed a modeling-optimization framework that can be used to find cost-effective solutions of BMP placement to attain nutrient load reduction targets. The framework integrates the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) watershed model, spatial representation of BMPs, an economic component, and multi-objective optimization routines in the R environment. The framework can be used to launch individual …

How Weather Uncertainty Impacts The Predicted Yield In An Agricultural Decision Support Tool?, Amélie Pinet, Romain Bourget, Pierre Moreau, Nathalie Saint-Geours, Julia Radoszycki, Philippe Stoop

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Crop models dynamically simulate nutrient and water cycles on a daily basis to predict crop growth and yield. They can be integrated into decsision support systems (DSS) dedicated to helping farmers improve their profitability and sustainability by pro-actively adapting their cultural practices (for example irrigation and fertilization). One key challenge is then the use of appropriate input data, and in particular of weather data: current weather data drive the simulation of the daily crop growth, seasonal forecasts are used to predict the yield at the end of the growing season, and both are elements on which farmers base their strategical …

An Integrated Interdisciplinary Modelling System Of Climate Change Impacts On Agriculture In Support Of Adaptation Planning: Mosaicc, Hideki Kanamaru, Mauro Evangelisti

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations developed a server-based integrated system of tools and models called MOSAICC to evaluate climate change impacts on the agriculture sectors (crops, water resources, forests, and economy). MOSAICC is designed to respond to the needs of developing countries which may benefit from institutional and individual capacity development in producing relevant information for national climate change adaptation planning. This innovative system design facilitates a participatory environment where researchers with different installations on the user's computer and makes maintenance and update of the system on the centralized server simple. MOSAICC is based on open-source technology …