DRU. Decision-making in Rangeland systems: an integrated Ecosystem-Agent-based Modeling Approach to Resilience and change (DREAMAR)

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Rangelands comprise about 25% of the earth's surface and these landscapes support more than 20 million people and most of the world's big animals. Most of the people who live in these regions of the world herd domestic livestock and some do limited cultivation so they are dependent directly on the environment for their livelihoods. But change is rapidly changing the environments upon which these people depend through such factors as population pressures, land use and land tenure changes, climate variability, and policy changes that affect their ability to earn a living. This project is about understanding uncertainty and change in this linked human-environment system. Through the development of agent-based modeling efforts linked to ecological models we will investigate the societal factors that enable households in these systems to make land use decisions so they can be resilient to uncertainty. Decisions that people make are expressed in land use and we will look at the effects of those decisions on ecosystem services. In other words, what is the ability of people to cope with change so that the social system and the ecological system can still provide for people and the animals that inhabit these systems? Thus it is important that we link a household model to ecological models. With work we have done in Mongolia, the northern U.S. Great Plains and in East Africa we will investigate the human-ecological effects in the face of change. Research that focuses on household and community behavior is important because it is at that level where fundamental decisions are made regarding events and changes and it is here where resilience is manifested. In the future we are going to have to be much smarter in the way that we match potential "clients" with potential policy or technical interventions. The only way to confer resilience (on social and ecological systems) is through much better targeting ability, a large part of which is intimately entwined with understanding how households make decisions.