Aporia

Aporia is an Agent Based Modelling framework for simulating rural land use change. It models the impacts of human behaviour and socio-economic scenarios on ecosystem services, and has been applied to several case studies around Europe, and connected to an Individual Based model of skylark populations. (Part of EcoChange) Aporia is an Agent Based Modelling framework for simulating rural land use change. It models the impacts of human behaviour and socio-economic scenarios on ecosystem services, and has been applied to several case studies around Europe, and connected to an Individual Based model of skylark populations. (Part of EcoChange)

There is growing interest in creating realistic, empirically grounded Agent Based Models (ABMs) to simulate land use change at a variety of spatio-temporal scales. The development of land use change models is challenging, at there is a need to connect representations of human behavioural processes to simulations of the biophysical environment. The Aporia modelling framework is an implementation of an earlier conceptual model of land use change and the provision of ecosystem services. Aporia is modular, flexible and open, using a declarative, compositional approach to create complex models from subcomponents; it can be tightly and loosely coupled with multiple vegetation models; it can be set up to model a range of ecosystem service indicators; and it can be calibrated for a range of different landscape-scale case studies and modelling styles. The framework is released under an Open Source license, and as such can be freely re-used and modified to form the basis of new models. We illustrate the use of Aporia using results from two case studies, showing the effects of different socio-economic scenarios and behavioural characteristics on the land use decisions of Belgian and Scottish farmers. Finally, we discuss the benefits of the framework in terms of flexibility, expandability, verification and transparency.