Decision Making in Rangelands Systems: An Integrated Ecosystem -Agent -Based Modeling Approach to Resilience and Changes ( DREAMAR)

1. Understand the attributes which affect household resilience/vulnerability to social or bio-physical perturbations. main interest is on the level of social organization that makes landuse decisions ( e.g households, communities, states) and the effect of resilience.other interest is the threshold of the system tat results in the movement of systems to a new set of livelihood strategies and under what conditions do the livelihood allow for learning and feedback. 2. Understand linkages between resources/ecosystems services and household landuse decision-making.Questions that the model expects to answer are:- a. How and to what extent do ecosystem services ( provisioning or supporting) influence household decision-making? b.How and to what extent do household and resilience/vulnerability affect ecosystem services? 3.Develop an integrated suite of models that will address objectives 1 and 2.Create a modeling system that reflects the complexities of decision making and repercussions of these decisions for the people and their ecosystems. Two ecosystems model ( SAVANNA and DAYCENT) used jointly on pastoral areas to simulate the state and change in ecosystem services. The two models then joined to a new agent-based household model (DACUMA).