Rehabilitation and Protection of Watershed Ecosystems Using Institutions and Intelligent Agent Simulations

Abstract

From Objectives:

"Public officials and citizens face difficult knowledge and information problems in rehabilitating and protecting watershed ecosystems. Two of the more prominent management approaches for governing watersheds - integrated, comprehensive management and community-based management are limited in coping with watershed problems that emerge at different scales.Furthermore, most modeling efforts in the social and natural sciences do not explicitly incorporate human behavior. Thus, public officials and citizens struggle to understand the interactions among individuals, land use and water use ordinances and regulations, and watershed ecosystem responses. This project proposes to address these knowledge and information problems by designing dynamic models that are accessible to public officials and citizens that incorporate land and water uses, the effects of those uses on watershed ecosystems,and human and ecosystem responses to different sets of land use and water use ordinances and regulations."