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Anthropogenic landscape disturbances are known to alter, destroy, and fragment habitat, which typically leads to biodiversity loss. The effects of landscape disturbance generally vary among species and depend on the nature of the disturbances, which may interact and result in synergistic effects. Western Canada's oil sands region experiences disturbances from forestry and energy sector activities as well as municipal and transportation infrastructure. The effects of those disturbances on single species have been studied and have been implicated in declines of the boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). Yet, the specific responses of the mammal community, and of functional groups such as prey and predators, to those interacting disturbances are still poorly known. We investigated the responses of black bear, grey wolf, coyote, fisher, lynx, red fox, American red squirrel, white-tailed deer, moose, caribou, and snowshoe hare to both natural habitat and disturbance associated with anthropogenic features within Alberta's northeast boreal forest. We used a novel community-level modelling framework on three years of camera-trap data collected in an oil sands landscape. This framework allowed us to identify the natural and anthropogenic features which explained the most variation in occurrence frequency among functional groups, as well as compare responses to linear and non-linear anthropogenic disturbance. Occurrence frequency by predators was better explained by anthropogenic features than by natural habitat. Both linear and non-linear anthropogenic features helped explain occurrence frequency by prey and predators, although the effects differed in magnitude and spatial scale. To better conserve boreal biodiversity, management actions should extend beyond a focus on caribou and wolves and aim to restore habitat across a diversity of anthropogenic disturbances and monitor the dynamics of the entire mammal community.

Insect outbreaks are natural phenomena that play a critical role in the development, senescence, and rebirth of forests. However, the damage caused by large-scale epidemics can have landscape scale...

Quantification of Land‐Use and Land‐Cover (LULC) changes associated with energy extraction footprints plays an important role in reclamation performance assessment, compliance monitoring, and sustainable land management practices. For regulatory planning and decision making purposes, it is crucial to understand the types and representation of disturbance present on the landscape related to energy footprints (i.e., oil, gas, and coal mining activities), non-energy footprints (i.e., other infrastructure), cutblocks, and wildfire. In this study, Landsat multispectral datasets were analysed using advanced classification and unmixing algorithms to calculate LULC changes associated with these disturbance agents from 1985 to 2015 in the Upper Peace Region, one of the major oil and gas exploration sites in Alberta, Canada. Based on 5-year intervals throughout this 30-year study, seven epochal LULC maps and a cumulative land disturbance map were produced with 82 % and 89 % overall accuracies, respectively, based on extensive and multisource, independent validation. Assessment of multiple disturbance regimes and time-series trajectories with high accuracies in this complex environment was vital to document and quantify disturbance, vegetation re-establishment, succession, and reclamation. Results indicate that more than 60 % forest loss (coniferous and deciduous) occurred due to harvesting and less than 20 % forest loss occurred due to energy and non‐energy footprints. An assessment of the current state showed 40–60 % of cutblocks and burned areas returned as immature forest and wetland and 15–20 % recovered to forest, accounting for successional processes that take time for the re-establishment of trees following disturbance. Out of total energy footprints, 8 % recovered as shrubland and 16 % recovered as forest, with almost no sign of vegetation recovery evident in non‐energy footprints (e.g., urban and long term industrial land use). The highest area of land disturbance (3412 km2) was over coniferous forest with 5-year disturbance areas of 55 km2, 65 km2, 70 km2, and 295 km2, associated with, respectively, wildfire, energy development, non‐energy footprints, and harvesting. This type of LULC investigation informs land‐use threshold management for energy footprints by identifying and partitioning key disturbance agents into land use. Knowledge of change type and land use enables insights on long term implications of the changes present and serves to guide sustainable development, environmental protection, and informing forward looking land use future state simulations.

After affecting millions of hectares of pine forests in western Canada, the mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonous ponderosae Hopkins) is spreading out of its native range and into Canada’s boreal forest. Impacts of outbreaks can be environmental, economic, and social, and an ecosystem services (ES) viewpoint provides a useful perspective for an integrated approach to assessing these impacts and may help to identify how possible management strategies could minimize these impacts. In this regards, a comprehensive overview of the ecosystem functions and socioeconomic factors that have been impacted by the current outbreaks in western Canada was carried out to facilitate a more general ES assessment. In addition to timber production, current MPB outbreaks have negative effects on provisioning services (water supply and food production) and aesthetic cultural services, while effects on regulating services (carbon and forest fire) are still in debate. Among the supporting services, nutrient cycling and aquatic habitat showed short- and long-term negative effects, while terrestrial habitat showed a mostly positive response. The overall impact on ES may be more severe if salvage logging is practiced as a post-MPB forest management strategy. The outcomes of this study may help to identify areas of greatest socioecological vulnerability to MPB and identify knowledge gaps and avenues for research to advance the ES framework for MPB outbreak management.

Land-change models are increasingly used to explore land-change dynamics, as well as for policy analyses and scenario studies. In this paper we review calibration and validation approaches adopted for recently published applications of land-change models. We found that statistical analyses and automated procedures are the two most common calibration approaches, while expert knowledge, manual calibration, and transfer of parameters from other applications are less frequently used. Validation of model results is predominantly based on locational accuracy assessment, while a small fraction of the applications assessed the accuracy of the generated land-use or land-cover patterns. Of the reviewed model applications, thirty-one percent did not report any validation. We argue that to mature as a scientific tool, and to gain credibility for scenario studies and policy assessments, the validation of land-change models requires consideration of challenges posed by uncertainty, complexity, and non-stationarity of land-change processes, and equifinality and multifinality of land-change models.

Humans currently spend over 3 billion person-hours per week playing computer games. Most of these games are purely for entertainment, but use of computer games for education has also expanded dramatically. At the same time, experimental games have become a staple of social science research but have depended on relatively small sample sizes and simple, abstract situations, limiting their range and applicability. If only a fraction of the time spent playing computer games could be harnessed for research, it would open up a huge range of new opportunities. We review the use of games in research, education, and entertainment and develop ideas for integrating these three functions around the idea of ecosystem services valuation. This approach to valuation can be seen as a version of choice modeling that allows players to generate their own scenarios taking account of the trade-offs embedded in the game, rather than simply ranking pre-formed scenarios. We outline a prototype game called “Lagom Island” to test the proposition that gaming can be used to reveal the value of ecosystem services. Our prototype provides a potential pathway and functional building blocks for approaching the relatively untapped potential of games in the context of ecosystem services research.

Participatory GIS has emerged as a useful tool for participatory planning and collaborative decision making. Many participatory GIS approaches are low-tech methods, including using physical objects such as 3D topographical models to assist with landscape recognition. More recently, physical 3D models have been augmented with light projection of digital landscape information and simulation models. Here we describe approaches currently being employed using 3D Projection-Augmented Landscape Models (3DPALM). We also explore the potential of emerging approaches that bridge traditional 3D participatory GIS and geosimulation models. Case studies are presented from Australia, Mexico and Canada that use physical 3D landscapes augmented with geosimulation models to support participatory planning, education and cross-cultural knowledge exchange. The work described in this paper suggests there are significant opportunities for the wider use of 3DPALM application to support a broad range participatory planning applications.

Archaeological data can be represented in quantitative models to test theories of societal growth, development, and resilience. This chapter describes the results of simulations employing integrated agent-based, cellular automata, and network models to represent elements of the ancient Maya social-ecological system. The purpose of the model is to better understand the complex dynamics of the Maya civilization and to test quantitative indicators of resilience as predictors of system sustainability or decline. The model examines the relationship between population growth, agricultural production, pressure on ecosystem services, forest succession, value of trade, and the stability of trade networks. These combine to allow agents representing Maya settlements to develop and expand within a landscape that changes under climate variation and responds to anthropogenic pressure. The model is able to reproduce spatial patterns and timelines somewhat analogous to that of the ancient Maya, although this model requires refinement and further archaeological data for calibration.

This paper examines the economic potential for fire management to provide offsets to carbon markets in the savannas of northern Australia. Long-term field trials in Australia's savannas have quantified greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions abatement resulting from improved fire management. However, little is known about the economic potential of fire management projects or the locations where projects might be economically viable for providing GHG offsets. A benefit–cost analysis of fire management for GHG offsets is presented here, which includes spatially explicit estimates for GHG abatement under three assumptions of management efficacy (conservative, empirically based, upper potential). The total supply of GHG abatement is estimated under different prices and management efficacy assumptions, and areas that pass the benefit–cost analysis are identified. At the Australian Government's carbon price of A$23 per metric tonne of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-e), fire management would be economically viable across 51 million hectares, all within the higher monsoonal rainfall regions of northern Australia, abating 1.6 million tonnes of CO2-e per year. These estimates suggest that fire management projects can contribute to GHG abatement targets and be financially viable across large areas of northern Australia. Additional benefits are anticipated from these projects for biodiversity conservation, livelihoods for indigenous Australians and economic development in remote regions.

The Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative is a global network of researchers and research projects with its International Program Office (IPO) now based at the Stockho ...

Water quality impacts from agriculture and rapid land use change along Australia's coastline pose challenges for maintaining healthy marine ecosystems and community livelihoods. This article presents an agent-based model of an emissions trading scheme to regulate water quality, examining the effect of land use change and different cap levels on the performance of the market. Simulation results suggest that the cap-and-trade system facilitates the expansion of high-input horticulture while maintaining the overall cap level, and that tighter cap levels have income distribution effects. Heterogeneity of productivity influences trading price, volume traded and gains realised from trading; also small homogeneous trading populations produce a thin market; and trading benefits might not justify creation and maintenance of the instrument and effort required to participate. Novel contributions of this article are how cap-and-trade systems function within a landscape in transition, and also modelling the equity of ...

Interconnected social and environmental systems are the domain of ecological economics, and models can be used to explore feedbacks and adaptations inherent in these systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) represents autonomous entities, each with dynamic behavior and heterogeneous characteristics. Agents interact with each other and their environment, resulting in emergent outcomes at the macroscale that can be used to quantitatively analyze complex systems. ABM is contributing to research questions in ecological economics in the areas of natural resource management and land-use change, urban systems modeling, market dynamics, changes in consumer attitudes, innovation, and diffusion of technology and management practices, commons dilemmas and self-governance, and psychological aspects to human decision making and behavior change. Frontiers for ABM research in ecological economics involve advancing the empirical calibration and validation of models through mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, participatory modeling, and, notably, experimental economics to test specific decision-making hypotheses. Linking ABM with other modeling techniques at the level of emergent properties will further advance efforts to understand dynamics of social-environmental systems.

The Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (Reef Plan) defined a landmark for policy in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) region. It identifies actions, mechanisms and partnerships and builds on existing government policies, industry and community initiatives for the purpose of “halting and reversing the decline in water quality entering the Reef within 10 years” through “reducing the load of pollutants from diffuse sources in the water entering the Reef”. A range of different indicators proposed for the nine strategies of the plan define policy goals that require an integrated assessment of the Great Barrier Reef region. In this context and under given uncertainties in regard to policy outcomes, decision support systems can help simulate the impact of potential policy options. Policy options involving water quantity and water quality questions and the underlying context of land use require an understanding of environmental, economic and social consequences. This paper presents an approach developed for the GBR region, which employs a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and an agent-based model (ABM) for integrated policy impact assessment. This applied modelling approach shows that strengths of different modelling techniques can be combined to support water policy decision making more effectively. This paper is focused on integration in the form of policy process and research response regarding model design on two system scales that provide cross scale decision support.

Water availability in outback Australia is defined by the occurrence of large rainfall events, and changes often from a situation of scarcity to temporary abundance. Informal institutions are often able to translate such dynamics into sustainable water-use rules. Policy interventions are mainly focused on changing access rules to avoid over-use or inefficiencies. Such formal institutional changes can lead to unexpected unsustainable outcomes; outcomes that are often captured in the 'story' behind informal arrangements. This paper analyses one case study on water access in outback Australia and translates field work results into an agent-based model. The agent-based model is calibrated based on data from experiments conducted with actual farmers from the case study region. In order to project unintended outcomes of institutional changes, interventions in water access is explored in an applied context. The core focus of the modelling exercise is the treatment of newcomers on a newly created trading scheme for water access rights. Simulation results show that total water extraction is significantly lower if the burden of water restrictions is limited to newcomers while the regional economic performance is not statistically different from a case in which the burden is carried by all irrigators. Interview data documents that currently extraction levels are regulated by informal processes as community members communicate observations on river health to irrigators who adjust accordingly, which indicates perceived personal responsibility. Overall, the environmental and economic performance of a water trading scheme that will replace this informal self-regulating system depends on how water restrictions are implemented and how valid the overall cap of 20% outtake is, which is not widely accepted throughout the community.

The science of ecosystem service (ES) mapping has become increasingly sophisticated over the past 20 years, and examples of successfully integrating ES into management decisions at national and sub-national scales have begun to emerge. However, increasing model sophistication and accuracy—and therefore complexity—may trade-off with ease of use and applicability to real-world decision-making contexts, so it is vital to incorporate the lessons learned from implementation efforts into new model development. Using successful implementation efforts for guidance, we developed an integrated ES modelling system to quantify several ecosystem services: forest timber production and carbon storage, water purification, pollination, and biodiversity. The system is designed to facilitate uptake of ES information into land-use decisions through three principal considerations: (1) using relatively straightforward models that can be readily deployed and interpreted without specialized expertise; (2) using an agent-based modelling framework to enable the incorporation of human decision-making directly within the model; and (3) integration among all ES models to simultaneously demonstrate the effects of a single land-use decision on multiple ES. We present an implementation of the model for a major watershed in Alberta, Canada, and highlight the system’s capabilities to assess a suite of ES under future management decisions, including forestry activities under two alternative timber harvest strategies, and through a scenario modelling analysis exploring different intensities of hypothetical agricultural expansion. By using a modular approach, the modelling system can be readily expanded to evaluate additional ecosystem services or management questions of interest in order to guide land-use decisions to achieve socioeconomic and environmental objectives.

Coastal regions, at the interface between terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems, play an important role in global biogeochemical cycles. This chapter reviews the climate regulation services of estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs) including tidal salt marshes, mangroves, seagrass beds, macroalgal forests, coral reefs, and coastal shelf ecosystems. ECEs regulate global and regional climates by sequestering or releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). ECEs are extremely productive biologically, with net primary production rates per unit area among the highest of any ecosystem. Consequently, ECEs play a globally significant role as carbon sinks, with carbon storage rates per unit area of many habitats far exceeding that of land habitats at the rate of about 10 times that of temperate terrestrial forests and 50 times that of tropical forests. Furthermore, sedimentation does not reach an equilibrium carbon balance as occurs in terrestrial systems, whose sequestration capacity is forecasted to decrease this century. Conversely, they are large potential sources of GHG’s if disturbed or mismanaged. Critically, carbon sequestration in many coastal habitats is superior to that of terrestrial habitats, as carbon is generally stored over long time frames (thousands of years) as a consequence of the large belowground biomass and the absence of fire threat. Furthermore, carbon is generally broken down anaerobically; hence, emissions of other potent GHGs such as methane and nitrous oxide are negligible. A review of literature provided sequestration rates for various coastal habitats. Using these in combination with global extent of selected habitats, this chapter finds that GHGs worldwide, mangroves, seagrass beds, and salt marshes combine to sequester a minimum of 136 000 tonnes C annually into long-term carbon storage. Assuming prices of CO2e from $10 to $90 per tonne, the value of the annual sequestration is $5 –45 billion. This is an underestimate due to data gaps and, the limited assessment of the area of these three coastal ecosystem habitats, and relates only to long-term storage. The figures do not include short-term carbon storage in biomass, and further unaccounted for carbon sequestration occurs in kelp forests, estuaries, and coastal shelf seas. Many ECEs are under threat globally from sea-level rise, coastal development, pollution, and other anthropogenic stressors, and protection and restoration of ECEs may be an important tool for mitigating climate change. Currently, these habitats are not included in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) carbon accounting frameworks, and therefore are excluded from incentive schemes such as carbon markets and other incentive programs, but their inclusion deserves consideration due to their potential for mitigating global climate change. The global distribution of C sequestration in ECEs reveals that large areas of the tropics are home to the highest sequestration rates and occur in developing countries, which also have the highest rates of coastal habitat degradation. Schemes such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) may bring revenues and added benefits to developing countries for instigating projects and marine protected areas for conservation. Many small island nations and developing countries in the tropics are particularly vulnerable to climate change and contain large swathes of seagrasses and mangroves compared to overall land area, but do not contain large areas of forests or grasslands, which would apply to REDD in its current form. Coastal habitats thus not only present an untapped potential for inclusion in climate change mitigation schemes, but also present a little-recognized risk of loss of large carbon stocks if their degradation and destruction are not reduced or halted.

Many contemporary societal challenges manifest themselves in the domain of humanenvironment interactions. There is a growing recognition that responses to these challenges formulated within current disciplinary boundaries, in isolation from their wider contexts, cannot adequately address them. Here, we outline the need for an integrated, trans-disciplinary synthesis that allows for a holistic approach, and, above all, a much longer time perspective. We outline both the need for, and the fundamental characteristics of, what we call “integrated history.” This approach promises to yield new understandings of the relationship between the past, present and possible futures of our integrated human-environment system. We recommend a unique new focus of our historical efforts on the future, rather than the past, concentrated on learning about future possibilities from history. A growing worldwide community of trans-disciplinary scholars is forming around building this Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Building integrated models of past human societies and their interactions with their environments yields new insights into those interactions and can help to create a more sustainable and desirable future. The activity has become a major focus within the global change community.

Interconnected social and environmental systems are the domain of ecological economics, and models can be used to explore feedbacks and adaptations inherent in these systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) represents autonomous entities, each with dynamic behavior and heterogeneous characteristics. Agents interact with each other and their environment, resulting in emergent outcomes at the macroscale that can be used to quantitatively analyze complex systems. ABM is contributing to research questions in ecological economics in the areas of natural resource management and land-use change, urban systems modeling, market dynamics, changes in consumer attitudes, innovation, and diffusion of technology and management practices, commons dilemmas and self-governance, and psychological aspects to human decision making and behavior change. Frontiers for ABM research in ecological economics involve advancing the empirical calibration and validation of models through mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, participatory modeling, and, notably, experimental economics to test specific decision-making hypotheses. Linking ABM with other modeling techniques at the level of emergent properties will further advance efforts to understand dynamics of social-environmental systems.

Quantifying cumulative environmental impacts (cumulative effects) is challenging due to complex dynamics of natural and human systems interacting. Cumulative effects in social-ecological systems are examples of emergent properties of complex systems, which arise from interactions between multiple resource users. The article presents a multi-agent-based simulation model designed to quantify cumulative effects in the case of interactions between forestry and hunting. The specific contributions of the paper are a) quantification of emergent properties in natural resource management systems, b) evaluation of different road decommissioning policies and the effect on game population sustainability, c) calibration of agent behaviours from numerous empirical studies. Preference weightings in the utility function of hunter agents are calibrated from stated and revealed preference studies of Canadian hunters. Simulations explore moose population sustainability under various forestry access management policies and with different hunter preference parameter configurations. Contrary to the intent of access management, earlier road decommissioning is found to negatively impact overall sustainability of game populations due to cumulative effects of aggregate hunter behaviour. Altering agents' preferences for travel cost, game populations, and hunter congestion result in dramatically different spatial outcomes for where game extirpations occur. Certain preference parameter settings create resonance between hunting pressure and game population growth, forming self-organized and persistent spatial resource use patterns.

Agent based models (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) micro-scale modeling have found abundant application in the area of urban land use and transport planning. These platforms enable a rich spatial representation of residential behavior. We present an urban ABM that deliberately emphasizes a sparse set of rules that influence agents' settlement decisions which interact with detailed spatial data on the geography and climate of a city region. Preliminary results are compared with historical data (1851 to 2001) of the urban growth of the City of Melbourne, the major urbanized area of the State of Victoria, Australia. We discuss potential extensions to the model and its value as an exploratory device for different transport and climate change scenarios.