Strawberry fields forever? Developing a socio-ecological Game with agro-diversity ver.2 for exploring biodiversity management issues in sustainable agriculture
Biodiversity loss associated to agricultural intensification is one of the most important issues on the global change agenda. Till recently, biodiversity within agricultural systems was perceived by mainstream science as a symptom and cause of economic inefficiency. Today it is increasingly recognized that biodiverse agriculture can be productive and play an important role in food security, in providing ecosystem services and in creating a wildlife friendly landscape matrix for biodiversity conservation. However, encouraging stakeholders towards maintaining or shifting to agrodiverse systems faces many social and ecological challenges: (1) in many cases, it is still unclear how much diversity is actually needed to provide basic inputs and services at the field level, and how specific ecological networks improve agroecosystem functions, (2) the relations between agricultural sustainability and agrodiversity management are not-easily grasped or demonstrated, as both are complex and long-term processes, (3) labor and/or financial constraints as well as transition costs can limit agrodiverse system adoption, (4) contrasting agrodiversity management strategies can coexist in the same landscape and influence each other both in positive and negative ways. Agent-based socio-ecological models -coupled with role-playing gamescan be powerful tools to understand and address the issues, tradeoffs and conflicts associated with the adoption and sustainable management of agrodiversity. In this paper we briefly present a "small" Agent-Based Socio- Ecological Model (AGRODIVERSITY ver. 2 programmed in Netlogo 3.1) and explore the model's current capacity to produce interesting scenarios for developing a role-playing game between virtual and/or flesh-and-blood stakeholders involved in agrodiverse system management.
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Texto biblioteca |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | Agrobiodiversidad, Agricultura sostenible, Conservación de la diversidad biológica, |
| Online Access: | http://www.dis.anl.gov/pubs/Agent2006.pdf |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|