The importance of spatial, temporal and social scales in Integrated modeling; simulating the effects of climatic change on district- and farm-level decision making in the Danube catchment area

Many scientific publications discussing the effects of climate change on the agricultural system express these in terms of changing crop production at coarse spatial and temporal scales. But in agro-economy, where crop production is the result of the interaction between bio-physical and management components, the temporal drivers operate at much smaller resolutions. Climate change affects the agricultural system via the interrelated, bio-physical layers of air, water, soil and crops. Furthermore, it influences the farm-system manager in their choice of their crops. In our paper the main question is how to deal systematically with the different time extents and time resolutions when studying agricultural management impacts due to climatic change. Agent based modeling offers an elegant way to tackle such challenges, where agents represent simplified farm managers. The agricultural management model is dynamically connected to a regional agro-economic model, a ground water model, a crop growth model and a soil model. Hence, we endogonize climatic change and make its effects a (risk)-factor in the agents considerations along different temporal scales. This paper reports on the fundamental issues regarding use of different temporal modeling scales with several clear practical examples.