Integrative Modeling of Environmental Change in Agroecosystem

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This award to the University of Michigan supports the research in Bali, Indonesia, of a cultural anthropologist studying the formal properties of wet-rice agricultural irrigation systems. The main focus is to understand how stable patterns of cooperation persist in the management of irrigation systems, given inescapable asymmetries in access to resources and incentives for cooperation. The research will develop and test a model that differs from previous models by incorporating a more realistic information about the regional ecosystem, and by expanding the social universe to include N players in an iterated game. The resulting model should predict changes in ecological processes (irrigation flows, pest diffusion, etc. ) and the payoffs for various strategies of cooperation or `defection`. These factors in combination can predict the patterns of cooperation in response to changes in the environment, such as increases in pests due to adoption of `Green revolution` agriculture (the causality to be modeled is thus complex with human decisions changing environmental variables which then impact on later decisions). The PI and his students will develop and test the model with measures of agricultural and ecological variables recorded through fieldwork over three summers. The project combines research and teaching in an innovative way since the students will be actively involved in field work and model specification. This research is important because this form of agriculture produces a significant amount of food in similar ecosystems in the world at large. Increases in our understanding of the sources of productivity, such as optimal water management and the management of pests to produce larger harvests is of obvious importance. In addition the advances in specification of formal models of such systems, that are more tightly tied to local and regional specifics while retaining their generalizing formal nature, will expand our general capacity to understand human behavior in this realm.