Speaker
Description
The environmental impacts of modern agriculture are a grave concern. Although policies such as the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) attempt to mitigate further damage to ecosystems, plant and animal species in agricultural landscapes continue to decline at alarming rates.
A major challenge in designing effective agricultural policies is that these must take multiple economic, social, and ecological aims into consideration. In addition, agriculture takes place at the intersection between societal and natural processes; it is influenced as much by legislation and market prices as it is by pollination and weather.
Simulation models are a valuable tool to help evaluate policies by exploring the likely outcomes of different scenarios. Agricultural policy-making in Europe has benefitted from existing economic and environmental models, which often explore abiotic phenomena such as climate and hydrology. However, there are few models that study the effects of agricultural policy and practice on biodiversity.
We present Persefone.jl, a new model of agriculture and ecosystems currently being developed at iDiv. Persefone.jl simulates agricultural landscapes as social-ecological systems, with interacting submodels of farm management, crop growth, and animal populations. This allows the model to replicate the spatial and temporal dynamics of such landscapes, and study their impact on species abundance and distribution as well as farm production. Thus, it synthesises knowledge from multiple research areas, building on empirical data and established theory to create an integrated process-based simulation.
To showcase how Persefone.jl can be used to evaluate policy, we use it to analyse the consequences of this year’s weakening of the CAP’s environmental regulations. We also briefly present our future development plans for including ecosystem services and climate change in the model. By making the software as accessible and adaptable as possible, we hope to establish Persefone.jl as a useful tool for future social-ecological research at iDiv.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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