Data from: Coupled land use and ecological models reveal emergence and feedbacks in socio‐ecological systems

Understanding the dynamics of socio‐ecological systems is crucial to the
development of environmentally sustainable practices. Models of social or
ecological sub‐systems have greatly enhanced such understanding, but at
the risk of obscuring important feedbacks and emergent effects. Integrated
modelling approaches have the potential to address this shortcoming by
explicitly representing linked socio‐ecological dynamics. We developed a
socio‐ecological system model by coupling an existing agent‐based model of
land‐use dynamics and an individual‐based model of demography and
dispersal. A hypothetical case‐study was established to simulate the
interaction of crops and their pollinators in a changing agricultural
landscape, initialised from a spatially random distribution of natural
assets. The bi‐directional coupled model predicted larger changes in crop
yield and pollinator populations than a unidirectional uncoupled version.
The spatial properties of the system also differed, the coupled version
revealing the emergence of spatial land‐use clusters that neither
supported nor required pollinators. These findings suggest that important
dynamics may be missed by uncoupled modelling approaches, but that these
can be captured through the combination of currently‐available, compatible
model frameworks. Such model integrations are required to further
fundamental understanding of socio‐ecological dynamics and thus improve
management of socio‐ecological systems.