MAELIA

MAELIA is a socio-agro-ecological modeling platform developed by INRAE since 2011. MAELIA combines agent-based and spatially explicit approaches to simulate interactions between biophysical processes (crops, soils, livestock, hydrology) and farmers’ decision-making at multiple scales: field, farm and region. MAELIA is an open-source integrated assessment and modelling tool implemented in the agent-based modelling platform GAMA. It combines agent-based decision rules with mechanistic but parsimonious process models, in a spatially explicit GIS framework with daily time steps. This design allows dynamic interactions between agricultural operations, weather events and biophysical processes, and the emergence of systemic properties from plot to landscape scale. MAELIA enables the integrated assessment of environmental, economic and social impacts of changes in agricultural activities at the watershed and field scale, running simulations over multiple years under various climate change and policy scenarios. It has been mobilised in over twenty research projects and supports scenario-based prospective approaches at territorial scale, including food system planning, agri-environmental policy evaluation, and bioeconomy strategies.