Socio-hydrological framework for investigating farmers’ activities affecting the shrinkage of Urmia Lake; hybrid data mining and agent-based modelling

Developing a general framework to capture the complexities associated with the non-linear and adaptive nature of farmers facing water resources scarcity is a challenging problem. This paper integrates agent-based modelling (ABM) and a data mining method to develop a hybrid socio-hydrological framework to provide future insights for policy-makers. The data associated with the farmers’ main characteristics were collected through field surveys and interviews. Afterwards, the association rule was employed to discover the main patterns representing the farmers’ agricultural decisions. The discovered patterns were then used as the behavioural rules in ABM to simulate the agricultural activities. The proposed framework has been was applied to explore the interactions between agricultural activities and the main river feeding the Urmia-Lake, Iran. The outcomes indicate that farmers’ acquisitive traits and belongings have significant impacts on their socio-hydrological interactions. The reported values of the efficiency criteria may support the satisfactory performance of the proposed framework.