Modeling the Feedback Loop Between Land Use Change and Non-spatial Actors: The ATLEA Framework

Modeling socio-ecological systems (SESs) through agent-based modeling has witnessed rapid developments over the past decades. However, several challenges still face this niche such as the difficulty of accurately simulating land use maps as an emergent pattern of actors’ decisions. Along with this challenge, accurately simulating the feedback of land use change to changes in actors’ actions driven by alterations in ecosystem services also remains a limitation in modeling SES. To provide solutions to these limitations, this study introduces ATLEA, a modeling framework for simulating the feedback loop between land use changes and non-spatial actors in an SES. ATLEA is composed of five sub-models that successively run in a time step: Actions of agents, Transitions in other land use types, Land use change mapping, Ecosystem services mapping, and Allocation of ecosystem services to agents. By adopting this modeling framework, emergent socio-ecological patterns of varying scales can be simulated after a specified time period such as demographics of actors, conditions of the environment, and maps of land use and ecosystem services. To develop an empirical model based on the ATLEA framework, the study recommends the implementation of pattern-oriented modeling by calibrating simulated patterns of social and ecological nature to match real-world patterns. The ATLEA framework could support future SES modeling endeavors, especially for cases where spatializing actors would be unachievable. Simulations through ATLEA models could inform future land use planning by predicting the subsequent impacts of social policies on land use.