An open framework for agent based modelling of agricultural land use change Dave Murray-Rust a, * , Derek T. Robinson b , Eleonore Guillem c , Eleni Karali d , Mark Rounsevell e a School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK b Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada c Scotland's Rural College, University of Edinburgh, UK d Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Italy e School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, UK article info Article history: Received 22 February 2014 Received in revised form 17 June 2014 Accepted 27 June 2014 Available online 22 July 2014 Keywords: Agent based modelling Land use/land cover change Open source Modelling frameworks Ecosystem services abstract There is growing interest in creating empirically grounded agent based models (ABMs) to simulate land use change at a variety of spatio-temporal scales. The development of land use change models is chal- lenging, as there is a need to connect representations of human behavioural processes to simulations of the biophysical environment. This paper presents a new agent-based modelling framework (Aporia) that has the goal of reducing the complexity and difficulty of constructing high-fidelity land use models. Building on earlier conceptual developments for modelling land use change and the provision of ecosystem services, Aporia was designed to be modular, flexible and open, using a declarative, compo- sitional approach to create complex models from subcomponents. The framework can be tightly or loosely coupled with multiple vegetation models, it can be set up to evaluate a range of ecosystem service indicators, and it can be calibrated for a range of different landscape-scale case studies and modelling styles. The framework is released under an Open Source licence, and can be freely re-used and modified to form the basis of new models. We illustrate this with two case studies implemented using Aporia, exploring different socio-economic scenarios and behavioural characteristics on the land use decisions of Swiss and Scottish farmers. We also discuss the benefits of frameworks in terms of their flexibility, expandability, verification and transparency. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Software availability Name of software: Aporia Developer: Dave Murray-Rust First available year: 2011 Software requirements: Java, Eclipse, Repast Simphony Programming language: Java Program availability and cost: Free, GPL, http://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/ display/aporia Contact person: Dave Murray-Rust E-mail: aporia@mo-seph.com 1. Introduction Agent based models (ABMs) are increasingly used to model humaneenvironment interactions (Rounsevell et al., 2012a,b). The degree to which these models have been empirically grounded (Janssen and Ostrom, 2006; Robinson et al., 2007) has also steadily increased from simple theoretical models to high fidelity models (e.g., Transims; Toroczkai and Eubank, 2006). In many cases, higher-fidelity ABMs are the result of coupling among models that enable dynamic feedback responses to human decision-making from human, natural, or both systems. For example, when exam- ining the effects of land management decisions, ABMs have been coupled to biophysical models that simulate processes such as plant phenology, crop vegetation growth, and water cycling (Bithell and Brasington, 2009; Luus et al., 2013; Monticino et al., 2007). From design through to implementation, the construction of land- * Corresponding author. E-mail address: D.Murray-Rust@ed.ac.uk (D. Murray-Rust). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Modelling & Software journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsoft http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.06.027 1364-8152/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Environmental Modelling & Software 61 (2014) 19e38