Abstract
Agricultural land-use change is a dynamic process that varies as a function of social, economic and environmental factors spanning from the local to the global scale. The cumulative regional impacts of these factors on land use adoption decisions by farmers are neither well accounted for nor reflected in agricultural land use planning. We present an innovative spatially explicit agent-based modelling approach (Crop GIS-ABM) that accounts for factors involved in farmer decision making on new irrigation adoption to enable land-use predictions and exploration. The model was designed using a participatory approach, capturing stakeholder insights in a conceptual model of farmer decisions. We demonstrate a case study of the factors influencing the uptake of new irrigation infrastructure and land use in Tasmania, Australia. The model demonstrates how irrigated land-use expansion promotes the diffusion of alternative crops in the region, as well as how coupled social, biophysical and environmental conditions play an important role in crop selection. Our study shows that agricultural land use reflected the evolution of multiple simultaneous interacting biophysical and socio-economic drivers, including soil and climate type, crop and commodity prices, and the accumulated effects of interactive decisions of farmers.
Highlights
As the climate changes and the global population grows, land and water resources will come under increasing pressure to sustainably raise productivity, improve wateruse efficiencies and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously adapting to climate change [1,2,3]
The scenario of irrigation expansion investigates resultant land use patterns, if irrigation expands in the Dorset region, in the context of how many farmers will adopt a high-value new alternative crop
This research developed a new approach for integrating social factors, societal pressures, crop prices, and land and water policies with biophysical data on soil type and climate by coupling an agent-based model with a GIS framework. We demonstrated this new methodology using the scenario of irrigation infrastructure expansion across the northeast of the Australian State of Tasmania
Summary
As the climate changes and the global population grows, land and water resources will come under increasing pressure to sustainably raise productivity, improve wateruse efficiencies and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously adapting to climate change [1,2,3]. The contemporary challenge is how to balance agricultural development and environmental conservation while sustaining both agricultural productivity and natural resources and maintaining social licence to operate. This is all the more critical given the importance of both the agricultural and forestry sector to the social and tourism values of the natural landscape and natural resource management in Australia [9]. There is a need for a new decision framework for agricultural land use planning that enables testing of multiple simultaneous and interacting factors through alternative scenarios to project the most effective and profitable use of irrigation water and the balancing of the agricultural landscape with peri-urban and agri-tourism land use development. While irrigation modelling has often been conducted at the farm level with a biophysical mindset [11,12], there have been few studies that have examined irrigated land-use expansion at the landscape scale
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