Building on history, sending agents into the future - rangeland modelling, retrospect and prospect

摘要

Rangeland science was complex enough when scientists had only to contend with animals and their feed resources. Now that science has put people centre-stage, rangeland scientists have to contend with a world that has become much more complex, much less certain, and spans a far greater range of issues, problems and interests. The globalization of markets and trade opportunities, as well as of policy and environmental issues (such as climate change), has meant that local-scale models or observationsare no longer adequate to address natural resource management issues. For the modeller, including people greatly increases the difficulty of representing the system adequately. There are two aspects of this problem. First, in developing management support tools for managers or policy-makers, the modeller has to understand what information the decision-makers use or require, as well as understanding how they reach their decisions. Second, in analysing how large-scale systems behave, people become a partof the model. This means that the modeller must understand and model not only the ecology, but also the social and economic components of the system.