Linking decision-making processes to land use patterns on the Great Plains

Background/Question/Methods

The Great Plains is alternately envisioned as an amber breadbasket or monolithic desert. The question lingers of how this marginal region plagued by droughts, emigration, and volatile commodity markets continues to produce crops and cattle year after year. The uncertainty and nonlinearity of social-ecological systems suggest placing value on diversity over homogeneity and resilience over stability. These values arise from the notion that persistent, seemingly stable states might be experiencing erosion of natural or social capital that can cause an abrupt shift at some threshold. Therefore, evidence of stability in a few factors may not be indicative of a system’s resilience and adaptive capacity, especially if that stability is maintained by forces outside the system and if other trends within the system show signs of capital losses. I built an agent-based model to simulate how landowners’ ability to respond to changing conditions alters land use patterns in eastern Colorado. Agent-based models assume autonomous actors make decisions from which observable behaviors or patterns emerge at higher levels. The initial modeling steps summarize and simplify landowner decision-making. I then developed a suite of five scenarios to study the influence of exogenous and endogenous forces on land use patterns.     

Results/Conclusions

My model supports the hypothesis that only slightly higher returns from alternative crops or conservation payments can alter landscapes on the western Great Plains. As expected, the initial attributes assigned to different landowners limit their ability to make any given decision at any given time step in the model. My first scenario shows that, with the reemergence of low wheat prices, new incentives can propel the switch from winter wheat to other crops. Similarly, an increase in conservation payments can shift cropland to grassland in the second scenario. This yields cyclic fluctuations in landscape patterns when conservation contracts expire. The latter scenarios seek to capture the unintended consequences of pairing inappropriate or unresponsive policies with adverse changes in precipitation. While landowner reactions to these scenarios are still more anecdotal than empirical, this model reinforces the need for a systems approach if landowners are to successfully adapt to changing conditions. More complete knowledge regarding the relationship between decision-making processes and land use patterns might provide a stepping-stone toward increasing resilience and adaptive capacity in eastern Colorado and throughout the Great Plains.