Social Innovation for Nutrient re-Cycling and Resource Efficiency (SINCERE)

    Project: NWO project

    Project Details

    Description

    Applying organic waste on farmland is a promising practice to increase soil quality, to save on resources, and to close nutrient cycles at regional level. Whether or not this potential is actually realized depends on many factors. One set pertains to the processes that occur within the soil; the other to the socio-economic environment in which farmers make their management decisions. Given the many interactions and feedbacks between actors and factors, an integrated approach is required that captures the complexity of the system. Hereto, we propose to develop and integrate a spatial agent-based model with a sophisticated soil-carbon-and-nutrient-cycling model.

    The agent-based model allows exploration of self-organizing networks of suppliers and users, based on decisions made by the individual agents. It captures heterogeneity among farmers, interactions between farmers (e.g. information sharing), and feedbacks from higher scale levels (e.g. economies of scale, discourses). The field-scale carbon-and-nutrient-cycling model assesses how and when the applied organic waste will improve soil physical and chemical properties and turn into benefits for the agents. By integrating these hitherto unconnected scientific fields, we can -for the first time- quantitatively assess the crucial interactions between the agro-ecological and societal domain. Through this integration, we create a virtual laboratory that reflects real-world situations to determine the temporal dimensions at which these interactions occurs and in which we can evaluate various policy options for stimulating organic waste applications.
    StatusFinished
    Effective start/end date1/03/1831/12/22

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