Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Validation And Application Of An Integrated Air Quality Model: From Source Dispersion To Respiratory Deposition, Vikas Kumar, Francisco Sánchez-Soberón, Joaquim Rovira, Montse Mari, Marta Schuhmacher

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Particulate matter (PM) is considered as a harmful air pollutant. Guidelines to calculate human health risk of PM are based on average activity intensity and outdoor concentrations of PM. However, most people in developed countries spend more than 85% of their time indoors, where PM composition and levelscould vary significantly from those found outdoors. To dealwith thisproblem, we present an integrated air qualitymodelling exercise focused on calculating the PM emission, dispersion and concentration out and indoors, as well as its associated health risks. To do so, we applied the dispersion model AERMOD in the Tarragona County, where several PM sources …

Theoretical Foundations Of Human Decision-Making In Agent-Based Land Use Models - A Review, Jule Schulze, Birgit Müller, Carsten M. Buchmann, Gunner Dressler, Niklas Hase, Falk Hoffmann, Felix John, Cheng Guo, Christian Klassert, Thomas Lauf, Veronika Liebelt, Henning Nolzen, Nadine Pannicke, Hanna Wise, Nina Schwarz, Jürgen Groeneveld

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Recent reviews stated that the complex and context-dependent nature of human decision-making resulted in ad-hoc representations of human decision in agent-based land use change models (LUCC ABMs) and that these representations are often not explicitly grounded in theory. However, a systematic survey on the characteristics (e.g. uncertainty, adaptation, learning, interactions and heterogeneities of agents) of the representation of human decision in LUCC ABMs is missing. To inform this debate we performed a quantitative review of 134 LUCC ABM papers using a standardised questionnaire with a particular focus on the characteristics and the theoretical foundation of human decision-making. Thereby, we investigated …

Dealing With Uncertainty: An Innovative Method To Address Climate Change Adaptation In The Whale Watch Industry, Jan-Olaf Meynecke, Russell Richards, Oz Sahin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Impacts of climate change on natural and human ‘systems’ are often difficult to assess due to high uncertainty and the need to integrate trans-disciplinary knowledge. This includes the worldwide, billion-dollar whale watching industry that depends on some key species such as the humpback whale. The migratory corridors, feeding, resting and calving sites, which are used for whale watching may be influenced by changing ocean currents and water temperatures. Whales are responding through a shift in migration time, behavior, abundance and distribution impacting on whale watching. To address these challenges, the authors developed a participatory model to understand and evaluate the …

The Design Of Distributed Model Integration Framework – Dmif, Getachew F. Belete, Alexey Voinov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Integration of models requires linking of components, which may be developed by different teams, using different tools, methodologies, and assumptions. Participating models may operate at different temporal and spatial scales. We describe and discuss the design and prototype of the Distributed Model Integration Framework (DMIF) that links models, which can be deployed on different hardware and software platforms. Distributed computing and service-oriented software development approaches are utilized to address the different aspects of interoperability. Web services are used to enable technical interoperability between models. To illustrate its operation, we developed reusable web service wrappers for models developed in NetLogo and …

Modelling Of Nitrogen Removal In A Free Water Surface Constructed Wetlands Of Tibet, China, Lixiao Zhang, Shoujuan Tang, Alexey Voinov

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The construction of free-water surface constructed wetland (FWSCW) for wastewater treatment at high altitude region has being tried in Tibet Autonomous Region, an area with extremely cold weather and low air pressure. The FWSCW was designed to receive nitrogen loading of about 8.00 kg/ha/d and hydraulic loading of 546m3/ha/d. This study aims to develop a model for estimating nitrogen (N) dynamics in this constructed wetland situated in Maizhokunggar county alongside Lhasa river. To ensure stable temperature for healthy biological actions, a passive solar house was built. The major nitrogen transformation processes considered in this study were mineralization, nitrification, denitrification, plant …

New Approach To Interactive Use Of Energy System Models For Policy Support, Evelina Trutnevyte, Phillip Bernsten

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A typical approach of producing a handful of energy scenarios with energy system models is limited because these scenarios cover only patches of the vast uncertainties and complexities inherent in the energy transition. Such a handful of scenarios is inflexible to serve the needs of the variety of policy makers and stakeholders in a rapidly changing policy arena. Interactive use of energy system models has proved effective for enabling users to browse through many scenarios for insight. Existing interactive tools, such as UK DECC2050 Calculator or Swiss Energyscope, ask users to choose one or several preferred energy scenarios. However, focus …

Assimilation Of Sar And Optical Data Into An Agro-Meteorological Model For Monitoring Yield Of Corn, Maël Ameline, Rémy Fieuzal, Julie Betbeber, Jean-Franҫois Berthoumieu, Frédéric Baup

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This study aims to assess the contribution of SAR and optical satellite images to estimate corn biophysical parameters and crop yield at field scale. Satellite data are assimilated into a simple agro-meteorological model named SAFY-WB (Simple Algorithm For Yield estimates combined with a Water Balance model), in order to simulate leaf area index, dry mass and yield. The method has been assessed thanks to data collected over two study areas (both located in the South-West of France), during two experimental campaigns: MCM’10 and MCM’15 (Multispectral Crop Monitoring), respectively performed in 2010 and 2015. SAR backscattering coefficients were acquired in the …

Using Sddp To Perform Basin-Wide Water Resources Assessments With Limited Data Availability, Charles Rougé, Amaury Tilmant

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In many situations, water resources assessments are hindered by the limited availability of data concerning both water supplies and demands. Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is one of few solutions available to determine optimal allocation policies in large-scale water resources systems. Yet, limited data on water demands and hydraulic infrastructure leads to the existence of multiple near-optimal solutions (MNOS). This work shows that when MNOS exists, SDDP is very sensitive to even minimal variations of the problem setting, e.g. initial conditions – we call this “algorithmic chaos”. Besides, the approximations of the benefit-to-go function that SDDP constructs at each stage …

The Global Geo Health Data Centre (Gghdc): A Web Service For Human Environmental Exposures, D. Karssenberg, I. Soenario, O. Schmitz, K. De Jong, H. De Raaff, I. Vaartjes, G. Hoek, M. Strak, B. Brunekreef, P. Hessels, F. J. De Groot, D. E. Grobbee, M. J. Dijst

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

To study environmental health effects, information is required on human environmental exposures, which encompass a wide range of attributes, for instance air pollution, water quality, or fast food restaurant density. Often it is preferable to assess exposure of each individual in a cohort or population, which requires assessment of exposures for large numbers of people. As direct measurement of personal exposure for entire populations is not feasible, exposure needs to be estimated by mapping environmental attributes, integrating observations and statistical or processbased modelling. This spatially and temporally continuous information is then aggregated over the space-time path of each individual resulting …

Advances In Probabilistic And Parallel Agent-Based Simulation: Modelling Climate Change Adaptation In Agriculture, Christian Troost, Thomas Berger

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

MPMAS is a software package for farm-level and agent-based simulation in agriculture that has been applied to a variety of agro-economic and bioeconomic case studies around the world in the last twenty years. We present recent advances to the software and its application that focus on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, massive parallel computing, land market interactions and farm succession. These extensions improve the applicability of agent-based simulation for ex ante assessments of climate adaptation in agriculture.

Challenges With Maintaining Legacy Software To Achieve Reproducible Computational Analyses: An Example For Hydrologic Modeling Data Processing Pipelines, Bakinam T. Essawy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Tanu Malik, Hao Xu, Michael Conway, Yolanda Gil

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In hydrology, like many other scientific disciplines with large computational demands, scientists have created a significant and growing collection of software tools for data manipulation, analysis, and simulation. While core computation model software are likely to be well maintained by the groups that develop these codes, other software such as data pre- and post-processing tools, used less often but still critical to scientists, may receive less attention. These codes will become “legacy” software, simply meaning that the software is out of date by modern standards. A challenge facing the scientific community is how to maintain this legacy software so that …

Uncertainty And Resilience Assessment Of Critical Infrastructures: Application Of Mcda To Fiumicino Airport, Carlo Giupponi, Juliana Bernhofer, Vahid Mojtahed

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The flooding of La Guardia airport after Hurricane Sandy and other airports around the world due to extreme events and the associated high social and economic costs of disruption in such services have shifted the attention of decision-makers to assessing the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and considering the resiliency of the future development plans. However, future climate and socio-economic changes as the main drivers of uncertainty has made the risk and resilience assessment a challenging task for analysts and decision makers. The level of uncertainty of these drivers is known to be deep, since we haven’t yet undergone those …

Health Impact Of Air Pollution On Italy: Main Findings Of Viias And Med Hiss Projects, Antonio Piersanti, Carla Ancona, Giovanna Berti, Ennio Cadum, Luisella Ciancarella, Ilaria D’Elia, Francesco Forastiere, Gaia Righini

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The effects of air pollution on human health in Italy have been recently estimated in two different projects with complete national coverage, VIIAS and EU LIFE+ MED HISS. The projects share the methodological approach of the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and the combined use of dispersion models and monitoring networks data, but differ on the exposure assessment and the overall objectives. VIIAS, using sub-municipal census data of population projected on the dispersion model grid, has estimated health outcomes on baseline years (2005 and 2010) and on three scenarios for 2020, in order to evaluate trends and effects of alternative policies. …

Methane Extraction From Lake Kivu: A Case Study For Model-Based Policy, Martin Schmid, Alfred Wüest

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Lake Kivu in East Africa contains enormous amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane. The dissolved methane is increasingly used as a resource to produce electricity, with two power plants currently in operation and several additional facilities in planning. The design of such gas extraction facilities needs to take into account possible negative impacts: if badly designed, the extraction could disturb the lake’s permanent density stratification and thus risk to create a catastrophic gas eruption; and it could increase nutrient fluxes from the deep water to the surface layers, leading to eutrophication and related negative consequences for the ecosystem, fisheries …

Agent-Based Modelling: What Matters Is Action, Franҫois Guerrin, Zoubida Afoutni, Rémy Courdier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Computer-aided management tools or models of production systems in the manufacturing or agricultural domains generally rely implicitly on the theory of planned action. Every action is assumed to be part of an anticipated sequence leading from a current state to a predetermined goal. The main limits of this classical view are due to the difficulty to deal with unexpected changes and disturbances. To overcome these limits, we developed an agent model based on the theory of situated action. Whereas the classical approach puts the emphasis on actor’s decision (action being assumed to straightforwardly follow), situated action is viewed as a …

Mathematical Modelling Of Sustainable Fisheries Management In Morocco, H. Essekhyr, K. Elkalay, K. Khalil

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Moroccan Atlantic coast is considered as one of the richest fishing areas in the world that support a rich assortment of aquatic biological diversity. In the past decade, the fisheries sector has achieved considerable growth. However, the sector suffers from many serious problems that need to be resolved to ensure their sustainable development. Such problems include over-fishing in the coastal, degradation of the marine environment and coastal resources. In this study, a mass-balance Ecopath Model of the Moroccan Atlantic coast is constructed, for improving fisheries management and attaining sustainable development of coastal fisheries in this ecosystem. The results indicate that …

Pasture Degradation As A Consequence Of Non-Compliance With Social Norms: Exploring Behavioral Strategies With An Agent-Based Simulation Model, Gunner Dressler, Karin Frank, Jürgen Groeneveld, Birgit Müller

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Pasture resting as a key strategy for sustainable grazing management has been in place for centuries in the form of social norms in rangeland systems. Most of these areas are drylands, characterized by low and variable rainfall and scarce resources that require well-adapted resource use strategies to avoid pasture degradation. However, in many areas such traditional norms are at stake as new management strategies are introduced by government authorities, new herders belonging to different ethnic groups enter the system, or former communal grazing land is converted into private property or agricultural land. As a result, compliance with traditional norms declines, …

The Sherpa Methodology And Implementation To Explore Potential Air Quality Improvements At The Regional/Local Scales, Enrico Pisoni, Philippe Thunis, Bart Degraeuwe, Alain Clappier, Giuseppe Maffeis, Roberta Gianfreda, Fabrizio Ferrari

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This work presents the SHERPA tool (Screening for High Emission Reduction Potentials on Air quality), a simplified air quality model that has been recently developed at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, to simulate the effect of local emission reduction policies on air pollution.

The SHERPA methodology is based on the concept of source-receptor models, that is to say on the use of simplified models able to mimic the link between emissions and concentrations as simulated by a complex deterministic Chemical Transport Model. As “family” of source-receptor models in SHERPA we used “linear regressions”, designed to simulate yearly PM25, PM10 …

The Case For Standardizing Procedural Knowledge Models For Cross-Discipline Data And System Integration, Aaron R. Byrd, David G. Tarboton

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Scientifically consistent and coherent systems for model and data discovery and integration rely on a shared body of concepts that describe the data and systems. The standardization of these disciplines is critical to the effectiveness of their ability to integrate data and systems across disciplines. There is, however, a significant shortcoming with most current approaches to creating these bodies of concepts. This is that the are designed to target only one type of knowledge--propositional knowledge--and neglect the other key type of knowledge--procedural knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is at the heart of the actual process of integrating data and systems across disciplines. …