Award

Map simulation tool for the agro-ecological evaluation of land use change scenarios in tropical insular environment

Description: The DESCARTES project aims at developing a cartographic simulation tool for assessing land use change scenarios on a given territorial extent. It is designed to take into account the points of view of different stakeholders (e.g. public bodies, actors of the agricultural sector) as well as a set of constraints (e.g. demographic pressure, public policies, environmental regulations). This tool will be used to test the “consequences and coherences” in terms of services (production and environmental services) of land use allocation scenarios in a territorial project, in order to reach an agreement between different parties towards the production of efficient ecological services. In this project, the simulation tool comes in support of a collective innovation process with the stakeholders of the territory. It aims to (i) develop a participatory approach which includes partners and the scientific community into implementing the project within a learning process; (ii) develop appropriate landscape modelling allowing this approach and (iii) develop a method to spatialize the environmental services of agriculture and to integrate them in the simulations. The simulation tool is applied on a study area located in Reunion Island. This island is representative of the issues and forthcoming stakes for agriculture: how to sustain development within a limited space, how to integrate new functions and to make up with new governance instances? The project considers two embedded spatial scales, that of the whole island which represent a “complete” territorial system, and that of a community of districts which gathers all the territorial issues of the island, and which has recently set up a landscape chart. The construction of the cartographic simulation tool is based on recent research works carried out by our teams, pertaining to (i) the development of a language and a software environment for modelling dynamic landscapes (ANR Project STAMP) and (ii) the deployment of an online agricultural information system (Margouill@ Platform). The DESCARTES project therefore tackles a number of issues that are currently hindering the sustainable management of territories and resources.

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Amount: €443,600

Funding type: grant

Funder scheme: Agrobiosphere

Start date: 2012-02-01

Investigator: Agnès BEGUE (lead)

Institutions: Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, CENTRE DE COOPERATION INTERNATIONALE EN RECHERCHE AGRONOMIQUE POUR LE DEVELOPPEMENT - CIRAD - DEPARTEMENT ES

Topic: Land Use and Ecosystem Services

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Funded outputs count: 2