MIRANA: a socio-ecological model for assessing sustainability of community-based regulations

The Malagasy local communities managing forest resources have difficulties in assessing the impacts of the management plans they decide upon. To help them, we have designed an integrated model with the ecological processes, the various regulations (zoning, quota, etc..) and the resulting inhabitants behavior in order to explore the impacts of scenarios. The model MIRANA has been designed using the MIMOSA framework in which one must design a conceptual model using ontologies, annotate the conceptual model with the necessary processes, and design a concrete model from which to generate the simulation model. In MIRANA, the conceptual model is made of the set of ontologies describing the actors of the system (households, communities, etc.), the objects they are acting on (lands, animal and vegetal species, etc.), the actions carried out by the actors on the objects (hunting, cultivation, etc.) and the regulations on the actions. The actors are provided with needs (food, money, etc.) or objectives (conservation, production, etc.) and planning mechanisms. The objects are provided with spontaneous processes (fertility dynamics, growth of biomass, etc.). This paper is focused on the representation and use of a multiplicity of normative structures for the regulation of the interactions with the environment.