mjstoroz / mayasim

An up-to-date version of Heckbert's 2013 NetLogo model "MayaSim"

MayaSim

An up-to-date version of Heckbert's 2013 NetLogo model "MayaSim"

The MayaSim model is an integrated agent-based, cellular automata, and network model representing the ancient Maya social-ecological system. The model represents the relationship between population growth, agricultural production, soil degradation, climate variability, primary productivity, hydrology, ecosystem services, forest succession, and the stability of trade networks. Agents representing settlements develop and expand within a spatial landscape that changes under climate variation and responds to anthropogenic impacts. The model is able to reproduce spatial patterns and timelines somewhat analogous to that of the ancient Maya, although this proof-of-concept model requires refinement and further archaeological data for calibration. This paper aims to identify candidate features of a resilient versus vulnerable social-ecological system, and employs computer simulation to explore this topic, using the ancient Maya as an example. Complex systems modelling identifies how interconnected variables behave, considering fast-moving variables such as land cover change and trade connections, meso-speed variables such as demographics and climate variability, as well as slow-moving variables such as soil degradation.

Scott Heckbert (2013, July 02). “MayaSim: An agent-based model of the ancient Maya social-ecological system” (Version 1.3.0). CoMSES Computational Model Library. Retrieved from: https://www.comses.net/codebases/3063/releases/1.3.0/

The current version of MayaSim available on the CoMSES Network is out of date (Netlogo v. 5.05) and does not run without modification to the original program. I provide an up-to-date version of the program here for anyone interested running the program without any additional modification.

Bibliography

Heckbert, S. (2013) MayaSim: An Agent-Based Model of the Ancient Maya Social-Ecological System. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. (https://www.jasss.org/16/4/11.html)

Heckbert, S., Isendahl, C., Gunn, J., Brewer, S., Scarborough, V., Chase, A.F., Chase, D.Z., Costanza, R., Dunning, N., Beach, T., Luzzadder-Beach, S., Lentz, D., Sinclair, P.. (2013). Growing the ancient Maya social-ecological system from the bottom up. In: Isendahl, C., and Stump, D. (eds.), Applied Archaeology, Historical Ecology and the Useable Past. Oxford University Press. (https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672691.013.30)

mayasim's Issues

Soils data unavailable

The link in the ODD and JASSS paper to the soil productivity data does not reveal where the dataset comes from. Therefore, I suggest we implement the Heckbert's recommendation from his 2013 JASSS paper:

Heckbert 2013 - Future work will aim to replace the existing dataset with the Harmonized World Soil Database (FAO et al. 2009) for finer spatial resolution and consistency across country borders.

The link is available here:

https://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/harmonized-world-soil-database-v12/en/

Fix ODD markdown file

Add in images from the original and fix the equations so they render properly

Movie function

The movie function needs to be updated to the latest version of Netlogo

Views

There are two views that do not work in the current version of this model, Trade Strength and Influence view. The issue is that in the previous version of Netlogo (5), the program uses anonymous procedures ( with the operator "?" "?1" "?2" etc.) that calls back to previous lists. I cannot figure out which of these lists are being called back to in the code line 626 and line 629.