person · draft
Michel Etienne
INRA plant ecologist in Avignon who modelled Mediterranean sylvopastoral systems, led companion modelling work across France and edited the 2014 book on the approach.
Michel Etienne, also written Étienne, is a plant ecologist and modeller.1,3 He was director of research at the Ecodevelopment Unit of INRA in Avignon, which studies how farm activities interact with environmental problems.1,3 By 2003 he had worked for twenty-five years on Mediterranean sylvopastoral systems, in which trees and forage are grazed by livestock. After ten years of research on those interactions he moved to building models that simulate how such systems change under different management practices, and then to decision support at the farm level and companion modelling at the scale of natural resource management.1
He is one of the leaders of the ComMod group and has applied companion modelling at many sites in France, on livestock farming and fire prevention, agricultural development and biodiversity conservation, and forest management and landscape dynamics.3 He edited Companion Modelling: A Participatory Approach to Support Sustainable Development (Springer and Quae, 2014), which sets out the stance behind the approach, its methods and tools, and the role of models in it, with 27 case studies and 7 teaching tools.3
He is one of the twelve signatories of the 2003 charter of companion modelling.2
- affiliation
- INRA, Ecodevelopment Unit, Avignon
- role
- plant ecologist and modeller
makes
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Participatory research approach from a group of mainly CIRAD scientists that builds role-playing games and agent-based models together with the people who use the land or resource.
open participation
Tags: companion modelling, participatory modelling, rangelands, fire prevention