Eleni Karali,  PhD Student, The University of Edinburgh.

Eleni Karali holds a degree in Environmental Science, from the University of the Aegean (Lesvos, Greece). In 2007, she earned a master’s degree (MSc) in Environmental Protection and Management, at the University of Edinburgh (UoE), with a focus on temperate forest plantations and the investigation of the effect of clear-felling management on greenhouse gas fluxes. Currently, she is a 1st year PhD student at Centre for the study of Environmental Change and Sustainability (UoE). Her research project is titled ‘Investigation of rural land use change and its consequences for ecosystem services, using agent based models’.

An integrated approach for the analysis of rural land use change in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland

Landscapes have experienced rapid and extensive alterations since the second half of the 20th century. Analogous trends are expected to continue in the future, which are likely to affect ecosystem service provision and bring about undesirable consequences for the environment and the human well-being. This paper presents an alternative approach for the analysis of land use change (LUC), which aims at gaining an in-depth and valid understanding of the processes that underpin it. Methodologically, it is based on the construction, testing and application of an agent-based model (ABM) for the simulation of the land-use decisions of individual and institutional agents and the application of an integrated sustainability assessment. For the purpose of this project, both of these tasks will be illustrated for the Canton of Aargau in Switzerland.

ABMs originated from computer sciences, but their use has recently gained popularity in LUC research. One of the main advantages of this technique is its potential to link human and natural systems at different spatial and temporal scales. Human dimension is a catalytic factor in land use decisions and one of the milestones of sustainability concept. However, in research, it has been either neglected , or conceptualised in an oversimplified way, using ad hoc frameworks, which can barely ‘ touch ’ the inherent complexity of real-world human behaviour. ABMs allow modellers to simulate diverse types of 'irrational' behavioural and decisional processes and carry out multi-disciplinary assessments of environmental change impacts, as driven by local forces and responses of adaptive agents. Moreover, the application of an integrated sustainability assessment will result in the identification of ‘ unsustainable ’ problems and the development of a vision about what a sustainable future might be. Then, in conjunction with the output of the ABM, it will lead to the assessment of the consistency and feasibility of this vision.

On a European level, rural areas have attracted particular attention and are now considered as one of the ‘ hot -spots ’ of LUC research. This has resulted from the concerns about the economic, political, demographic and technological transformations in the European profile and, on a national level, about the increasing internal migration and the expansion of the urban environment at the expense of agricultural and forest land. Therefore, the Canton of Aargau is an ideal study area for this type of research, firstly because of the environmental and socio-economic changes that it has been experiencing during the last decades and secondly due to the variety of ecosystem types that it hosts, which range from mountainous forested areas to flat, agricultural land. These features provide the opportunity to test the hypothesis that socio-economic attributes of land managers determine their land use decisions, explore the role of the social network and the institutional agents on decision making process and finally assess the effect of these decisions on ecosystem service provision.

The project is currently in progress. Its design phases include (1) collection of data on the socio-economic attributes of appropriate agents and the physical attributes of the case study area, (2) statistical analysis of the agent attributes and identification of agents ’ typologies, goals and behavioural rules with respect to land use change, (3) construction of a land use change model, using agents ’ rule-based approach within the Repast modelling framework, (4) development of modelled procedures that link the land use change outcomes to an assessment of ecosystem service provision, (5) calibration, validation, sensitivity analysis and application of the model under alternative future scenarios of climate and socio-economic changes.