A Model of the biocomplexity of deforestation in tropical forest: Caparo case study

This paper presents some preliminary results with a multi-agents modeling approach to understand the complexity of deforestation in tropical forests. The approach was applied to the study of the deforestation of the Caparo Forest Reserve, in the western part of Venezuela. The model includes, among others, the following types of agents: several instances of settlers, government and lumber concessionaries. Settler agents represent people of limited economical resources that occupied land of the reserve with the aims of improving their socio-economical status and obtaining in the future the property of the occupied land. They use subsistence agriculture and they try to maximize the benefits from the land occupation, without knowing that they could generate ecological or environmental problems such as soil exhaustion, due to inexistent or poor management practices. The lumber concessionaires are represented by companies that are constantly supervised by the State; their work is to exploit the forest using management plans previously approved in agreement with the Government. In addition to the dynamical interactions of the agents, the used approach includes also a cellular automata model for the simulation of the dynamic of the natural system. Both aspects use representational tools developed in house: Galatea [Uzcátegui, 2002] for the multi-agents aspects, Actilog [Dávila, 2003] a logic language for the description of rules, and SpaSim [Moreno, 2001, 2003] for the Cellular automata aspects.