Abstract
This paper presents an assessment of land use changes andtheir impacts on the ecosystem in the Montado, atraditional agricultural landscape of Portugal in response to globalenvironmental change. The assessment uses an agent-based model (ABM) of the adaptive decisions of farmers to simulate theinfluence on future land use patterns of socio-economic attributes such associal relationships and farmer reliance on subsidies and biophysicalconstraints. The application and development of the ABM are supported empiricallyusing three categories of input data: 1) farmer types based on a clusteranalysis of socio-economic attributes; 2) agricultural suitability based onregression analysis of historical land use maps and biophysical attributes; and3) future trends in the economic and climatic environments based on the A1fiscenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Model sensitivityand uncertainty analyses are carried out prior to the scenario analysis inorder to verify the absence of systematic errors in the model structure. Theresults of the scenario analysis show that the area of Montado declinessignificantly by 2050, but it remains the dominant land use in the case studyarea, indicating some resilience to change. An important policy challengearising from this assessment is how to encourage next generation of innovativefarmers to conserve this traditional landscape for social and ecologicalvalues.
Highlights
Traditional, low intensity agricultural areas in Europe are increasingly appreciated by society for their biodiversity, landscape value and cultural functions
Land abandonment can cause social problems, and ecological problems. It constrains the multi-functionality of agro-ecosystems [52] and increases the risk of fires in unmanaged forests due to the accumulation of dead wood [5] [7] [51], with an increase in drought intensity arising from climate change
The traditional agricultural systems with oaks that have persisted during the 20th century have passed through cycles of use and abandonment (Gallego and Garcia Novo 1997 as cited in [3])
Summary
Traditional, low intensity agricultural areas in Europe are increasingly appreciated by society for their biodiversity, landscape value and cultural functions. Land use change models based on multi-agent systems are designed to integrate human decision processes into a location-specific context in order to explain patterns of land use or settlement and test understanding of land use functions [10] Many of these studies have been theoretical and agent-based models (ABM) of agricultural land use in particular are often not supported by empirical data [11]. These studies seek to take advantage of the key strengths of ABM in capturing the heterogeneity of agent profiles, the dynamics of their interactions and their behaviour in response to the geography of physical space These attributes of ABM are especially useful when exploring land use change futures, where farmer decisions are influenced by changes in the economic and climatic environments, and by their social and cultural values.
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