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

该项目建立了一个社会科学和自然科学联盟，以促进基于主体的社会生态动力学建模(ABM)。该组织将为科学界服务，作为合作和跨学科研究的框架，强调人与环境之间的复杂互动。将于2007年初举办的讲习班将汇集社会科学和自然科学领域ABM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，组织该联盟。受邀参与者包括在社会生态研究中使用ABM的广泛科学家和ABM平台开发人员。讲习班之后将开展一项试点项目，以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--在正在进行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档案和ABM组件库，研究人员可以使用它们来启动新的建模工作，并帮助同行审查涉及ABM的研究出版物；用于协作开发更好的ABM界面和网络工具的服务器，以提高ABM在社会生态学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试验台。该联盟还将在社区范围内推广一套模型传播的最佳实践和模型交换框架，并启动一项针对社会科学家和自然科学家的ABM培训计划。最初的组织讲习班和试点项目是人类进化与社会变革学院(亚利桑那州立大学)、复原力和适应管理小组(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。研讨会将在社会动力学和复杂性中心举行，试点项目资源服务器将在那里管理。人与环境之间的交互既是动态的，也是复杂的。在过去的一个世纪里，这种复杂性与日益快速的人口增长、城市化和技术发展交织在一起，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，有可能超出我们使用传统战略进行适应的能力。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为帮助理解和管理这些相互关联的社会和自然系统提供了强大的新工具。在这种背景下，基于智能体的模型最近已经成为一种很有前途的网络工具，用于研究复杂的人类和生物系统的动力学，将个体的感知和行为整合到背景行为生态学、决策的博弈论和世界的地理空间表示中。通过这个项目建立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主体的建模，并使其结果可供不同的受众使用和使用。由于有关社会生态系统动态的问题是全球范围内日益重要的政策辩论的核心，在这里启动的该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.