RAGE RAngeland Grazing Model (1.0.5)

In many dryland regions, traditional pastoral land use strategies are subject to change. Drivers such as demographic change, but also socio-economic change (liberalization of markets, new income options) may lead to an adjustment of livelihood strategies and behavior of pastoral households.

The RAGE model is a multi-agent simulation model that captures feedbacks between pastures, livestock and household livelihood in a common property grazing system. It implements three stylized household behavioral types (traditional, maximizer and satisficer) which are grounded in social theory and reflect empirical observations. These types can be compared regarding their long-term social-ecological consequences. The types differ in their preferences for livestock, how they value social norms concerning pasture resting and how they are influenced by the behavior of others.

Besides the evaluation of the behavioral types, the model allows to adjust a range of ecological and climatic parameters, such as rainfall average and variability, vegetation growth rates or livestock reproduction rate. The model can be evaluated across a range of social, ecological and economic outcome variables, such as average herd size, pasture biomass condition or surviving number of households.

The model belongs to the following publication:
Dressler G, Groeneveld J, Buchmann CM, Guo C, Hase N, Thober J, Frank K, Müller B (2018) Implications of behavioral change for the resilience of pastoral systems – lessons from an agent-based model. Ecological Complexity, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2018.06.002

Release Notes

2018-06-07: small bugfixes in the model code and the plotting routines.
2017-07-17: first model version uploaded.

Associated Publications