To better anticipate the impact of global changes on hydrology, it is necessary to take into account water usage in hydrological modeling.
The objective of this work was to couple an irrigation usage representation at the individual farmer and plot scale in an agent-based model with the distributed hydrological model J2000. The case study was the Buëch watershed, where irrigation is predominantly gravity-fed.
This work was successfully conducted on a sub-basin and highlighted the methodological challenges related to spatial and temporal couplings for models operating at different scales.

In a context of global change, management of water resources between actors with sometimes conflicting objectives should be revisited. Modeling and simulation tools, dedicated to prospective analysis, are being developed at Irstea, in partnership with stakehoders of water management. Hydrological processes are rather well know and modeling and simulation platforms are available for their simulation. However, before they can produce relevant prospective scenarios, several improvments are required, in particular accounting for feedbacks loops between social and physical dynamics. Distributed hydrological modeling enables the simulation of hydrological dynamics considering spatial heterogeneity of the catchments and consequently gives the opportunity to imagine local feedback loops related to human activites. The objectives of the thesis is to couple an existing distributed hydrological model to an agent based model representing social dynamics and driving the local feedback loops related to human activities. We propose to use the theory of situed action (providing a framework to describe individual actions and decisions) and the concept of stigmergy (providing a framework to describe indirect interactions amongst actors) to build the agent based model. In this context, the decision making process of one or several agents is based on the set of actions that he can possibly realize at each moment. this implies to put the focus on the variables of interest of the agent (perceived variables and control variables, including hydrological variables) that are most of the time local variables. Hence, the exercice of coupling the agent model and the hydrological model will consist mainly in defining agents's variables of interest and to relate them to state variables or outputs of the hydrological model. This link will enable to specify local feedback loops related to human activities and furthermore to get spatial simulation outputs matching stakeholders' variables of interest. The scope of the PhD thesis is limited to the main sectors of activity of the two chosen sub-catchments of the Durance river. We will iteratively measure the impact of the implemented local feedback loops on the outputs computed at the scale of the sub-catchment. The impacts of local and sectoral adaptations (mainly from the irrigated agriculture sector constituting the main water use), on the global behavior oh the hydrosystem, under constraints of management strategies specified at the scale of the sub-catchment (incentives, regulations,..).

Funding

Ecole doctorale ABIES et Action ZABR-Agence RMC RadHy-Buëch (Représentation intégrée des Adaptations individuelles et des Dynamiques HYdrologiques sur le bassin du Buëch (RADHY Buëch).

Publications and communications

• Bastien Richard, 2020. Coupling agent-based and agro-hydrological modeling to represent human actions within an agro-hydrosystem. Application to collective irrigation in the Buëch catchment (France). Ecole doctorale ABIES, AgroParisTech, soutenance le 17/12/2020, 323 pp. https://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03181172
• Richard, B., Bonté, B., Braud, I., Barreteau, O., 2020. L’abandon des tours d’eau et ses conséquences opérationnelles sur les systèmes d’irrigation collectifs. Une approche multi-agents situationnelle appliquée à un canal gravitaire de moyenne Durance (France), La Houille Blanche, 4, 43-55, https://doi.org/10.1051/lhb/2020033
• Richard, B., Bonté, B., Delmas, M., Braud, I., Barreteau, O., Braud, I., Cheviron, B., Veyssier, J., 2022, A co-simulation approach to study the impact of gravity collective irrigation constraints on plant dynamics in Southern France, Agricultural Water Management, 262, 107205, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2021.107205.
• Richard, B., Bonté, B., Barreteau, O., Braud, I., 2022. Representing collective irrigated systems at the operational level: a multi-agent approach based on affordance, Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 3, 17893, https://doi.org/10.18174/sesmo.17893

Cite the thesis

Bastien Richard. Coupling agent-based and agro-hydrological modeling to represent human actions within an agro-hydrosystem. Application to collective irrigation in the Buëch catchment (France).. Hydrology. Institut agronomique, vétérinaire et forestier de France, 2020. English. ⟨NNT : 2020IAVF0023⟩. ⟨tel-03181172⟩

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