Olive growing has been facing major constraints due to intensification, resulting in an increase of use of pesticides and fertilizers and, consequently in the degradation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity and landscape values. This has created an urgent need to develop models for managing complex agroecosystems that integrate factors affecting food quality, sustainability and biodiversity to provide a supporting technique to understand the consequences of agricultural management for ecosystems services. We are developing an advanced base-agent simulation (ABS) applied to the olive grove to preview and evaluate the effects of farming practices on the abundance of predaceous species of olive pests. ABS is a modelling technique where agents represent animals (predaceous arthropods, in our case) acting in their environment. Our model is based on an ABS system developed in Denmark (ALMaSS) that can include highly detailed farm management and spatial structures. In this work we will present the conceptual model for one of the selected species, Haplodrassus rufipes (Araneae: Gnaphosidae), and some early stage results of the computer simulation of the ABS model for this species. At a later stage, our model will be tested with real observed data collected from selected study sites located in Portugal in order to produce a useful tool for decision making. This is a joint work of a multidisciplinary team involving agronomists, entomologists, ecologists, mathematicians and software engineers.

This work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the project PTDC/ASP-PLA/30003/2017 - OLIVESIM - Managing ecosystem services in olive groves using advanced landscape agent-based Models