HSD: Community Development Proposal: Integrating Socio-Ecological Sciences Through a Community Modeling Framework

该项目在社会科学和自然科学领域建立了一个联盟，以促进社会生态动态的基于代理的建模（ABM）。 该组织将为科学界提供合作和跨学科研究的框架，强调人类与环境之间复杂的相互作用。将于2007年初举行的一次讲习班将汇集社会和自然科学领域反弹道导弹研究的主要和创新实践者，利用其他研究领域开发网络工具的社区框架的成功范例，组织该联合会。受邀与会者涵盖了在社会生态研究中使用ABM的各种科学家和ABM平台开发人员。讲习班之后将开展一个试点项目，开发和评估一套资源，帮助联合会成员以及更广泛的社会科学和自然科学从业人员在进行中和计划中的研究中更有效地利用先进的反弹道导弹模拟协议。这些资源包括基于代理的模型和ABM组件库的存档，研究人员可以使用这些组件来启动新的建模工作，并协助对涉及ABM的研究出版物进行同行评审;用于协作开发更好的ABM接口和网络工具的服务器，以提高ABM在社会生态研究中的可用性和有用性（例如，并发版本服务器或CVS）;以及用于开发模型评估协议的标准数据测试床。该联盟还将促进一套社区范围的模型传播和模型交换框架的最佳实践，并启动一个针对社会和自然科学家的ABM培训计划。最初的组织研讨会和试点项目是人类进化社会变革学院（亚利桑那州立大学），复原力和适应性管理小组（阿拉斯加大学），人类学系（亚利桑那大学），社会动力学和复杂性中心（亚利桑那州立大学）和圣达菲研究所之间的合作。研讨会将在社会动态和复杂性中心举行，试点项目资源服务器将在那里管理。人类与环境之间的互动既动态又复杂。这种复杂性在过去的世纪中随着人口增长、城市化和技术发展的日益迅速而加剧，使人类社会成为环境变化的重要驱动力。这造成了社会环境变化的速度和程度，有可能超过我们使用传统战略的适应能力。因此，人类必须找到更好的方法来了解这些全球社会生态系统（或“社会生态系统”），并预测其社会和自然后果，以减少潜在的严重社会自然灾害的风险。信息技术的最新进展提供了强有力的新工具，以帮助理解和管理这些相互耦合的社会和自然系统。在这种情况下，基于代理的模型最近出现作为一个有前途的网络工具来研究复杂的人类和生物系统的动态，整合个人的感知和行为的背景下行为生态学，决策博弈论，和地理空间表示的世界。通过该项目创建的联盟将建立一个社区范围的框架，以促进在社会生态学研究中更有效地使用基于代理的建模，并使其结果对不同的受众可用和有用。由于社会生态系统的动态问题是全球范围内日益关键的政策辩论的核心，因此这里启动的计划的长期议程也提供了更好地为环境政策及其对人类社会的影响的讨论提供信息的潜力。

This project establishes a consortium in the social and natural sciences for facilitating agent based modeling (ABM) of socioecological dynamics. This organization will serve the scientific community as a framework for collaboration and interdisciplinary research, emphasizing the complex interactions between humans and the environment. A workshop, to be held in early 2007 will bring together leading and innovative practitioners of ABM research in social and natural sciences to organize the consortium, using successful examples of community frameworks for cybertool development in other research domains. Invited participants span a wide range of scientists employing ABM in socio-ecological research and ABM platform developers. The workshop will be followed by a pilot project to develop and evaluate a suite of resources that will help consortium members -- and practitioners in the social and natural sciences more broadly -- make more effective use of advanced ABM simulation protocols in ongoing and planned research. These resources include an archive of agent based models and library of ABM components that can be used by researchers to initiate new modeling efforts and assist peer-review of publications of research involving ABM; a server for collaborative development of better ABM interfaces and cybertools to improve the usability and usefulness of ABM for socioecological research (e.g., concurrent version server, or cvs); and a testbed of standard data for developing model evaluation protocols. The consortium also will promote a community-wide set of best practices for model dissemination and frameworks for model interchange, and initiate a training program in ABM aimed at social and natural scientists. The initial organizing workshop and pilot project are a collaboration between the School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Arizona State University), the Resilience and Adaptive Management Group (University of Alaska), the Department of Anthropology (University of Arizona), the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity ((Arizona State University), and the Santa Fe Institute. The workshop will take place at the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and the pilot project resources server will be managed there.The interactions between humans and their environments are both dynamic and complex. This complexity has intersected over the past century with increasingly rapid population growth, urbanization, and technological development to make human society an important driver of environmental change. This has created a rate and degree of social-environmental change that threatens to exceed our abilities to adapt using traditional strategies. Hence, it is imperative that humans find better ways to understand these global socio-ecological systems (or "socioecosystems"), and anticipate their social and natural consequences in order to lessen the risk of potentially severe socio-natural catastrophes. Recent advances in information technology offer powerful new tools to assist in understanding and managing these coupled social and natural systems. In this context, agent based models have recently emerged as a promising cybertool to study the dynamics of complex human and biological systems, integrating individual perceptions and behaviors in the contexts behavioral ecology, game theory of decision-making, and geospatial representations of the world. The consortium created through this project will establish a community-wide framework to promote more effective use of agent based modeling in socioecological research, and make its results accessible and useful to diverse audiences. Since questions about the dynamics of socio-ecological systems lie at the heart of increasingly critical policy debates at global scale, the long-term agenda of the program initiated here also offers the potential to better inform discussions of environmental policy and its consequences on human society.