An Agent-Based Model for understanding the Multiple Uses of Land and Resources Around Drilling Sites in Sahel

In Sahel, land and resources are used, depending on the season, by various actors with interests that are sometimes difficult to reconcile. The competition for space and time for access to natural resources induces a set of processes, including overgrazing and conflicts over access to water. In such a complex agrosylvopastoral context, acquiring and formalizing knowledge about the practices and rules that govern the system is essential to helping and accompanying rural populations towards the sustainable management of their environment. Among the new modeling tools coming from the field of Artificial Intelligence, AgentBased Models (ABMs) are now widely used to tackle the issue of integrated natural resource management. The rise of ABMs is partially due to intelligibility, not only by scientists from various research fields, but also by the stakeholders. It thus becomes easier to build an understandable representation of the system as an “artificial world” and to perform simulations to collectively test and discuss various resource management scenarios. In this article, we present a description of an ABM which has designed to formalize interactions between the biophysics dynamic of natural resources and socio-economic factors driving the land-use dynamics around the drilling of Thieul in the “Réserve sylvo-pastorale” (sylvopasture) of Ferlo.