Location: Laboratoire d'Ingénierie des Systèmes Complexes, Cemagref, Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Duration: 24 months.

Beginning: January 2009.

Monthly salary is: 2150 €.

Context of the post-doctorate

The post-doctorate takes place in the PRIMA European project. More particularly, the work will be integrated in the following objectives of the project:

1.      Develop models of municipality dynamics to analyse policy impacts on multifunctional land uses and on the economic activities on a set of municipality case studies. The municipality is the level of scale at which the main actors can be identified; they interact at this level; last many measures start at this level. The models will rely on micro-simulation and agent-based models, designed and validated at municipality level using input from stakeholders. The models will address the structural evolution of the populations (appearance, disappearance and change of agents) depending on the local conditions for applying the structural policies on a set of municipality case studies. The models will focus only on agriculture, forestry, tourism and biodiversity/ecology.

2.      Extract from these case study models a set of virtual municipality prototypes, beyond the case studies, which show contrasted features and dynamics, and are relevant for the set of municipalities of each given regional case study. These municipality prototypes should show robust dynamics, and be relevant to the stake holders.

3.      Build mappings between the available data on municipalities (census, FADN, …) and the municipality prototypes. This mapping will reflect the likelihood that a municipality, described with the available data, is a given mixture of the municipality prototypes, and will therefore provide an insight on its structural trends as well on the potential impact of the structural policies. Moreover, such a mapping will enable to aggregate the outputs of the model (land use, tourism, economic trends, ecosystem functions…) at the regional level.

Stemming from 6 countries, with three EU-15 members (United Kingdom, France, Germany), 2 new members (Czech republic, Bulgaria) and a candidate (Croatia), the selected regional case studies cover such a wide array of geographic, environmental and socio-economic backgrounds, thus making them particularly relevant for the assessment of rural development, cohesion and pre-accession policies. In these regional case studies, the project will consider subsets of municipalities from which we shall develop refined micro-simulation and agent-based models.

Objectives and scope of the post-doctorate

The post-doctorate will focus on point 2 of the previous section. This will include more precise objectives:

-         Extract the main dynamical characteristics of the micro-simulation and agent-based models of municipalities, developed on the municipality case studies, by analysing systematically the impact of variations in parameters and hypotheses.

-         Identify significant and robust differences between the municipality case study models,

-         Develop, if relevant, hybrid or simplified models to get more contrasted prototypes, check their relevance with stake holders, and their generality on larger sets of municipality evolutions.

-         Evaluate the uncertainties on future evolutions, depending on the uncertainties on the parameters and the dynamics.

The central part of the research is thus about building systematic simulation experiments on the models, in order to evaluate their sensitivity to the different parameters, but also to the different hypotheses on the dynamics, and how this affects their ability to account for available data. The post-doctorate will use SimExplorer, the software developed in LISC and devoted to such task. It is expected that he/she could develop new methods or variants, particularly adapted to the problem.

The post-doctorate will also contribute (in collaboration with other partners) to other parts of the project, which are closely connected to this central part:

-         Development of the first micro-simulation and agent-based models,

-         Evaluation of the relevance of the prototypes for the stake-holders,

-         Definition of data to collect and their preparation for using them in modelling.