Computational modeling of pastoralist societies that range as nomads over diverse environmental zones poses interesting challenges beyond those posed by sedentary societies. We present HouseholdsWorld, a new agentbased model of agro-pastoralists in a natural habitat that includes deserts, grasslands, and mountains. This is the paper-of-record for the HouseholdsWorld model as part of a broader i...

Please World Summary.— The debate over the future and development of African pastoral systems is dominated by two paradigms that are considered mutually exclusive: the modernization and the mobility paradigm. However, an ethnographic study of a peri-urban pastoral system in the Far North Province of Cameroon shows that these paradigms need and should not be mutually exclusive. Peri-urban pastor...

Traditional grazing grounds near Amboseli National Park (Kenya) are being rapidly converted to cropland – a process that closes important wildlife corridors. We use a spatially explicit simulationmodel that integrates ecosystem dynamics and pastoral decision-making to explore the scope for introducing a ‘payments for ecosystem services’ scheme to compensate pastoralists for spillover benefits a...

Driven by population pressures on natural resources, peri-urban pastoralists in the Far North Province of Cameroon have recently intensified livestock production in their traditional pastoral system by feeding their cattle cottonseed cakes and other agricultural byproducts to cope with the disappearance of rangelands typically available through the dry season. Although the crop–livestock intera...

Background: Pastoralists have long inhabited vast areas of western China, including the Tibetan Plateau region. Their traditional land use practices and cultural conservation ethic have helped to protect the natural resource base upon which they depend and the wildlife that co-exist with them in the grassland landscapes. However, in a rapidly changing socio-economic environment, including signi...

The process of crop domestication began 10,000 years ago in the transition of early humans from hunter/gatherers to pastoralists/farmers. Recent research has revealed the identity of some of the main genes responsible for domestication. Two of the major domestication events in barley were (i) the failure of the spike to disarticulate and (ii) the six-rowed spike. The former mutation increased g...

The agents represent mobile pastoralists that have herds consisting of 200 animals. The risk of disease transmission increaseswhen agents are in close proximity, for examplewhen sharing common grazing areas or transhumance routes. To represent the risk of transmission due to proximity we use a bu er with a fixed radius for all agents for the entire year. We change the bu er size to explore di e...