Agent-Based Modelling of Self-Organisation Processes to Support Adaptive Forest Management

Summary Managing the numerous and interrelated processes between man and nature in order to use renewable resources in a sustainable way is confronted with conflicting objectives, external effects, complex interdependencies, uncertainty and other features that make it nearly impossible to come to unambiguous optimal decisions. Self-organisation in socioeconomic and ecological systems - the process of structuring a system by the elements of the system themselves without hierarchical or external control - is often the reason for ambiguity and uncertainty. Adaptive management is an approach to deal with these challenges. This natural resource management method is permanently monitoring both socioeconomic and ecological systems in order to be able to react rapidly on any development pushing the systems into an undesired direction. Understanding and simulating the underlying self-organisation processes helps to make the adaptive management of renewable resources both more effective and more efficient. In this chapter we present a simple model of self-organisation concerning the use of forest resources. It consists of two submodels: The submodel of the socioeconomic system comprises firms producing wood-based goods who buy and forestry companies who sell timber. The ecological system is represented by a forest succession model. After a brief description of both submodels, some preliminary results of simulating forest succession by using NetLogo are presented.