Modelling – Page 5 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Moving from models that synthesize to models that innovate

September 11, 2024March 24, 2016

By Pete Loucks

When computer technology became available for developing and using graphics interfaces for interactive decision support systems, some of us got excited about the potential of directly involving stakeholders in the modeling and analyses of various water resource systems. Many of us believed that generating pictures that could show the impact of various design and management decisions or assumptions any user might want to make would give them a better understanding of the system being modeled and how they might improve its performance.

We even got fancy with respect performing sensitivity analyses and displaying uncertainty. Our displays were clear, understandable, and colorful. Sometimes we witnessed users even believing what they were seeing. We occasionally had to remind users that our models were, and would continue to be, approximations of reality, at best. It was fun developing and using such tools, and indeed today most models that are used to analyze river basins, groundwater, and coastal zones incorporate interactive, graphics-based, decision support frameworks.

Modeling as social practice

September 5, 2024March 10, 2016

By Jeremy Trombley

Modeling – the creation of simplified or abstract representations of the world – is something that people do in many different ways and for many different reasons, and is a social practice. This is true even in the case of scientific and computational models that don’t meet the specific criteria of “participatory” or “collaborative.” Scientists and modelers interact with one another, share information, critique and help to refine one another’s work, and much more as they build models.

Furthermore, all of these activities take place within broader social structures – universities, government agencies, non-government organizations, or simply community groups – and involve resources – funding sources, technologies – that also have social factors that are both embedded within and emerging from them. Understanding the relationship between all of these social dimensions as well as those of the problems that modeling is being used to address is an important task, particularly in participatory modeling projects.

Ten dimensions of integration: Guidelines for modellers

September 5, 2024March 8, 2016

By Serena Hamilton and Tony Jakeman

authors_mosaic_serena-hamilton-tony-jakeman — 1. Serena Hamilton (biography)
2. Tony Jakeman (biography)

Why Integrated Assessment and Integrated Modelling? In our highly connected world environmental problems have social or economic causes and consequences, and decisions to assist one segment of a population can have negative repercussions on other parts of the population. It is broadly accepted that we require integrated, rather than piecemeal approaches to resolve environmental or other complex problems.

Integrated Assessment and its inherent platform, Integrated Modelling, bring together diverse knowledge, data, methods and perspectives into one coherent and comprehensive framework. This process of organizing and synthesizing multiple forms of information across disciplinary and conceptual boundaries allows us to explore linkages and feedbacks between different parts of the system, as well as the trade-offs involved with alternative management interventions on different socioeconomic and environmental criteria.

Why participatory models need to include cultural models

September 5, 2024March 4, 2016

By Michael Paolisso

Participatory modeling has at its heart the goal of engaging and involving community stakeholders. It aims to connect academic environments and the communities we want to understand and/or help. Participatory modelling approaches include: use facilitators, provide hands-on experiences, allow open conversation, open up the modeling “black box,” look for areas of consensus, and “engage stakeholders” for their input.

One approach that has not been used to help translate and disseminate participatory models to non-modelers and non-scientists is something psychologists and anthropologists call “cultural models.” Cultural models are presupposed, taken-for-granted understandings of the world that are shared by a group of people.

Cognitive anthropologists, including those who focus on human and environment interactions, developed the theory and method of cultural modeling in order to understand the cultural knowledge and values that individuals use to “make sense,” understand, and evaluate the world around them.

Modelling is the language of scientific discovery

June 25, 2025December 2, 2015

By Steven Gray

Modeling is the language of scientific discovery and has significant implications for how scientists communicate within and across disciplines. Whether modeling the social interactions of individuals within a community in anthropology, the trade-offs of foraging behaviors in ecology, or the influence of warming ocean temperatures on circulation patterns in oceanography, the ability to represent empirical or theoretical understanding through modeling provides scientists with a semi-standardized language to explain how we think the world works. In fact, modeling is such a basic part of human reasoning and communication that the formal practice of scientific modeling has been recently extended to include non-scientists, especially as a way to understand complex and poorly understood socio-environmental dynamics and to improve collaborative research. Although the field of participatory modeling has grown in recent years, there are still considerable questions about how different software tools common to participatory modeling can be used to facilitate communication and learning among diverse groups, which approaches are more or less suitable (given the nature of a community or environmental issue), and whether these approaches effectively lead to action-oriented outcomes.