Mark Rouleau

ForestSim model of impacts of smallholder dynamics: forested landscapes of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Many forested landscapes in the United States contain a large number of small private landowners (smallholders). The individual decisions of these smallholders can collectively have a large impact on the structure, composition, and connectivity of forests. While models have been developed to try to understand this large-scale collective impact, few models have incorporated extensive information from individual decision-making. Here we introduce an agent-based model, infused with sociological data from smallholders, overlaid on a GIS layer to represent individual smallholders, and used to simulate the impact of thousands of harvesting decisions. Our preliminary results suggest that certain smallholder characteristics (such as relative smallholder age and education level as well as whether a smallholder is resident or absentee) and information flow among owners can radically impact forests at the landscape scale. While still in its preliminary stages, this modeling approach is likely to demonstrate in detail the consequences of decision-making due to changing smallholder demographics or new policies and programs. This approach can help estimate the effectiveness of programs based on landscape-scale programmatic goals and the impact of new policy initiatives.

ForestSim: An Agent-Based Simulation for Bioenergy Sustainability Assessment

Global development must become more sustainable. To do so, society must adopt a sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels (Dincer 2000). Second-generation bioenergy from woody biomass (trees and other woody plants) offers a promising alternative that can avoid both the inevitable finite supply problems and climate change impacts of conventional energy (Hoogwijk et al. 2003). However, the sustainability of second-generation bioenergy depends greatly on the availability of a reliable woody biomass supply (Becker et al. 2009). The provisioning of biomass feedstock requires significant land-use land-cover change in the form of forest harvesting activity that greatly impacts local forest ecology, the viability of bioenergy markets, and other socially valued forest uses. These overlapping and often competing interests make estimating the availability of biomass and assessing its sustainability impacts a highly complex task (Berndes et al. 2003). The current chapter provides a framework for using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to assess the sustainability of bioenergy production in a way that accounts for this inherent complexity.