BeModeLS: Behavioural Models of Land Systems

The behavioural models of land systems working group is a joint venture between the AIMES project and the Global Land Programme. In linking two Global Research Projects of the Future Earth network, the group aims to support and build interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines. The group welcomes a wide range of perspectives and members with interests in any aspects of human behaviour (e.g., individual, collective, and organisational) in land systems models and its interactions with other land system processes.

Overview

The working group supports the development of the next generation of land systems models that represent diverse human behaviour, agency, decision-making and institutional processes. These models explore a wide range of key research and policy questions at the nexus of food, ecosystems, water, climate and energy across multiple land systems and scales (from landscape to regional to global). This approach supports understanding of climate change adaptation and mitigation processes, as well as sustainability transformations, with land systems used as exemplars of other social-ecological and coupled human-natural systems and their components.

The working group promotes alternatives to econometric, equilibrium-based and ‘top-down’ models based on the rational actor model by incorporating insights about human behaviour from the behavioural sciences. This working group encourages rich representations of human behaviour and institutional processes with a focus on the diversity of actors and their interactions with one another and their physical environment, whether proximal or distal in space (e.g., due to telecoupling). Key objectives are to support the construction of a library of models to compare representations of human decision-making, to stimulate social simulation experiments, and to promote identification of actions to support sustainability policies. The working group aims to catalyse the coupling of behavioural land-use models with other model types, such as dynamic global vegetation models, biodiversity models and/or climate emulators to explore a wide range of environmental change drivers and to evaluate the consequences of these for ecosystem services. As such, we welcome scholars and practitioners working on representing behaviour and social institutions in simulation models spanning a range of topics (including, human behaviour in large-scale simulations and social-ecological contexts, adaptation to climate extremes, and social processes of transformation).

Given the diversity of decision-making contexts globally, many models representing agency, behaviour and social processes (e.g., norms, formal institutions and organisations) in land systems are possible and have been developed. To advance knowledge in this domain the working group advocates the comparison and synthesis of these models and insights generated from them. Through frequent webinars and other activities, the working group will foster an inclusive, active, diverse and cooperative global community of behavioural land system modellers.

The group page on the Global Land Programme site can be found here.

Goals and Objectives

The overall aim of the working group is to support the creation of the next generation of land systems models that represent diverse human behaviour, agency, decision-making and institutional processes. The specific objectives are to:

• Foster an inclusive, active, diverse and cooperative community of social-ecological land system modellers;
• Support construction of a library of models and associated code to enable comparison and synthesis of approaches and mechanisms for modelling human behaviour in land systems;
• Motivate development of sets of common data against which to compare and benchmark human behaviour models and modelling approaches in land systems;
• Foster the use of social science theories and insights for building models of human individual and collective behaviour and its embeddedness in social-ecological land systems;
• Stimulate experiments that use and compare different models of land user/manager decision processes based on alternative theories;
• Encourage the design and implementation of new models of institutions (social norms, markets, public policy, organisations, investment companies, etc.) and their interactions with land users and managers;
• Push for the integration of varied representations of the collective processes evident within communities and societies that moderate individual behaviour, e.g. knowledge exchange, changes in social norms and learning;
• Catalyse exploration of the impacts of future environmental change scenarios (climate and socio-economic change) on the land system, and the adaptive learning of land users and managers;
• Promote identification of best targets for policy levers to achieve sustainable land system actions (e.g., identification of the best incentives/disincentives in different contexts);
• Support the development of theories of land system change;
• Support efforts to couple behavioural models of human activity within land systems with other models, including earth systems models, through improved understanding of the processes underlying human-environment interactions.

Working Group Steering Committee

News & Events

Newsletters

October – December 2022
January – March 2021
October – December 2020

Working Group Members

The large-scale behavioural models of land use change working group is a joint venture between the AIMES project and the Global Land Programme. In linking two Global Research Projects of the Future Earth network, the group aims to support and benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines. The group therefore welcomes a wide range of perspectives and members with interests in any aspects of human, individual and collective behaviour in land system models.

Interested in joining this working group? Send an email by clicking the button below.

Bulent Acma, Anadolu University, Turkey
Michael Aduah, University of Mines & Technology, Ghana
Rakibul Ahasan, Texas A&M University, United States
Zarema Akhmadiyeva, IAMO, Germany
David Akinwamide, Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, Nigeria
Felicia Olufunmilayo Akinyemi, Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Botswana
Peter Alexander, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Almut Arneth, KIT, IMK-IFU, Germany
Michael Barton, Arizona State University, United States
Dan Brown, University of Washington, United States
Katherine Calvin, PNNL, United States
Abraham Coiman, Central University of Venezuela, Venezuela
Natalie Davis, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Alan Di Vittorio, Berkeley Lab, United States
Vasco Diogo, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research, Switzerland
Yue Dou, Michigan State University, United States
Nils Droste, Lund University, Sweden
Felix Eigenbrod, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Hanna Ekström, Lund University, Sweden
Alejandro Flores, Boise State University, United States
Marta Gallardo, University of Murcia, Spain
Nancy Golubiewski, Ministry for the Environment, New Zealand
Maria Virginia Gonzalez, Consejo Nacionales de Investigaciones Cientifica y Tecnicas (CONICET), Argentina
Clovis Grinand, NITIDAE, France
Burak Güneralp, Texas A&M University, United States
Paula Harrison, Centre of Ecology and Hydrology, United Kingdom
Roslyn Henry, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Martin Jung, IIASA, Austria
Victoria Junquera, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Albert Kettner, University of Colorado, United States
Jennifer Koch, University of Oklahoma, United States
Franck Koman, SRGD, Ivory Coast
Gerbrand Koren, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Carsten Lemmen, Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, C.L. Science Consult, Germany
Melvin Lippe, Thuenen Institute of International Forestry and Forest Economics, Germany
Jorge C. Llopis, University of Bern, Switzerland
Marco Madella, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Nicholas Magliocca, University of Alabama, United States
Ziga Malek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Alma Virgen Mendoza, UNAM, Mexico
Patrick Meyfroidt, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
M. Surabuddin Mondal, Nims University, India
Thomas Nesme, Univ. Bordeaux, France
Michael Obersteiner, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Aurobindo Ogra, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Richard Orozco, ATB, Germany
Spandan Pandey, Clark University, United States
Dawn Cassandra Parker, University of Waterloo, Canada
Oliver Perkins, King’s College London, United Kingdom
Gary Polhill, The James Hutton Institute, United Kingdom
Ajin R. S., Kerala State Disaster Management Authority, India
Derek Robinson, University of Waterloo, Canada
Kimberly Rogers, University of Colorado, United States
Alena Schmidt, University of Basel, Switzerland
Luana Schwartz, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research, Germany
Bumsuk Seo, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Sacha Siani, Indiana University, United States
Garry Sotnik, Stanford University, United States
Matteo Sposato, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Zhanli “Jerry” Sun, IAMO, Germany
Peter Verburg, VU University of Amsterdam; WSL Switzerland, Netherlands
Chris Vernon, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, United States
Yuan Wang, Nanjing University, China
Kerstin Wiegand, University of Göttingen, Germany
Tim Williams, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Xin Zhao, Joint Global Change Institute, PNNL