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

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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.