Integrating the diversity of farmers’ decisions into studies of rural land-use change

Although there is a large body of research into complex land-use/cover change (LUCC), the mechanisms that underlie land transformation are still poorly understood. To a large extent this results from the limited attention that has been paid to the human dimension in LUCC studies. While environmental processes are described by detailed and sophisticated frameworks, human behaviour has often been theorised in oversimplified ways. This paper presents a novel approach to the analysis of rural LUCC that integrates agent-based models (ABMs) with a multi-phase social survey. Findings from the application of the latter to a farming area in Switzerland are used as an illustrative example to support the argument for the need to obtain insights into human decision-making processes and their complex interactions with the locale-specific environment in order to successfully simulate LUCC.