From July 10 -14 2016 the eighth International Congress on Environmental Modelling & Software iEMSs 2016 will take place in Toulouse, France.

We will organize a session and an associated workshop on the following topics:

• Session D6: “The Importance of Human Decision Making in Agent-Based Models of Natural Resource Use”
• Workshop D2: “The Challenges of Implementing Human Decision Making in Agent-Based Models of Natural Resource Use”

In this session we seek to stimulate discussion around the topics of how human decisions can be represented in ABMs, with an explicit focus on the integration of behavioral theories and empirical data, the validation of decision making rules and the upscaling from human decisions at the local scale to regional and higher scales.

We invite presentations that:

• Present ABMs that explicitly address human decision making in the context of natural resource use.
• Propose new approaches or concepts on how human decisions can be adequately represented in models.
• Present reviews about this topic.

The associated workshop will address the challenges of a) selecting and specifying the elements of the decision process and b) implementing these decision models adequately and efficiently. The discussion will focus on which standard models for decision making exist and how these can be expanded along dimensions of as interaction and learning, social norms, habitual behavior or collective decision making, as well as the possibility of developing prototype decision making models.

More information on sessions and workshops can be found here:

You may either submit an abstract or a brief technical paper (8 page max) for the presentation. Accepted technical papers will be published in the conference proceedings. The submission deadline is March 31st 2016, and the submission page can be found here:

Gunnar Dressler,

Session organizer