Toward an Integrated Tool for Complex Environmental Systems Modeling: A Cellular Automata Approach

Abstract

Toward the world, there was more works done at different levels to model and estimate the impact of human activities on the environment, in particular the agriculture impact on the environment in the USA, Japan and Switzerland in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OCDE. Through this works two approaches were identified: - A specific approach that considers only one aspect, such as impact on water, and studied over a wide area, or even throughout the territory of a country, - A regional approach which considers the issue as a whole, taking into account all aspects in a restricted area. However, at the national level several specific works, treating the impact of a single parameter on the environment has been made. Besides, no integrated study was conducted in a rigorous manner. As part of this paper, we opted to consider environmental issues as a whole, based on a regional approach. We present in this paper, an integrated framework for modeling environmental phenomena's based on the combination of Cellular Automata models, GIS and multi-spatial analysis approach. The approach was implemented via the development of a simulation tool to model flood, erosion, vegetation dynamics, using date from a region in north morocco to initialize and validate the models.