A distributed socio-hydrological framework for integrating perception and groundwater dynamics in farmers’ crop choice modeling

This study introduces a socio-hydrological model to simulate farmers’ crop selection, considering both economic constraints and their individual perceptions of aquifer conditions. An agent-based model, incorporating the Theory of Planned Behavior, captures farmers’ heterogeneous responses to water table fluctuations. It is integrated with the MODFLOW groundwater simulation, enabling a dynamic interplay between farmer behavior and aquifer dynamics. The model is applied to the Isfahan-Borkhar aquifer in central Iran, revealing significant impacts of aquifer conditions and farmer welfare levels on water consumption patterns. The results highlight a conflict between profit-seeking and aquifer preservation, with farmers suffering from low net benefits potentially ignoring the critically low water table in particular areas. The application of incentive and punitive policies, including increasing prices of low-water-demanding crops, imposing fines on high-water-demanding crops, and implementing a water market, have led to changes in profit by + 88%, -5.4%, and + 12%, respectively, with the aquifer level improvements of 1.05, 1.15, and 1.66 m.