natural resources

Today marks the official relaunch of the Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ) under a new name – Agricultural and Environmental Modelling (AEM), an open-access journal dedicated to advancing the science and practice of computational and mathematical modelling across agriculture, food systems, natural resources, and environmental sciences.

The first editorial published under the AEM name sets out the journal’s expanded vision, its new article types, and its call to the modelling community.

What Has Changed and What Has Not

AEM retains the founding mission of its predecessors: to make ‘modelling research objects citable, discoverable, and reusable’ and transparent. The journal’s commitment to open access, rigorous peer review, and the recognition of modelling as a first-class scientific endeavour remains unchanged. Publication in AEM remains entirely free for all authors.

What has changed is the scope and structure. The journal’s disciplinary scope now spans the full breadth of modelling in the agricultural and environmental sciences, including management systems, production dynamics, agroecological modelling, as well as food safety, production, quality and supply-chain control, biotechnological research, socio-ecological systems, resource management and more.

Publishing the Full Modelling Lifecycle

A defining feature of AEM is its structured range of article types, designed to give formal, peer-reviewed recognition to each group of authors at every stage of a model’s development.

A complex model is not born in a single paper: it emerges through cycles of formal specification, software implementation, calibration, testing, and application, often carried out by different teams across different project phases. Each of those steps represents genuine scientific work; each deserves recognition.
reads the editorial

Among the most distinctive publication types is the Formal Model, which offers a citable recognition for foundational mathematical and conceptual design. Alongside the more standard article types, such as Review Article; Research Article; and Short Communication, AEM also welcomes contributions framed as Model Testing and Calibration; Model Implementation and Documentation; Software Description; and Data Paper. For each article, the journal’s team has provided an article template to assist authors.

Commitment to Open Science and Reproducibility

AEM is built around the FAIR principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability – these are applied to data, code, and models as peer-reviewed outputs. As such, the journal mandates that all underlying data and source code are made openly available; while machine-learning methods must follow the DOME-ML reproducibility guidelines.

Published on Pensoft’s ARPHA Platform, the journal establishes transparency standards and requires author declarations for LLM use. AEM is archived in CLOCKSS, Zenodo, Portico, and Zendy, and indexed in more than 40 services, including AGRICOLA, Cabells, CABI, FAO AGRIS, and ResearchGate.

Recent research

Overview diagram of the conceptual population model for APODEMUS. The model simulates the wood mouse life cycle, growth and reproduction. Landscape composition is captured by habitat types (numbers) and influences the space use of the simulated wood mice. Exposures can be linked to the use of defined habitat patches and types. Credit to Singer et al., 2026

The most recent paper demonstrates how the Formal Model article type has been utilised to describe APODEMUS, a spatially-explicit simulation model designed to improve pesticide risk assessments for the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) in European agricultural landscapes. The model provides regulators with a rigorous, transparent blueprint for evaluating how agricultural pesticides affect wild animal populations at the landscape scale.

An Invitation: Submissions and Editorial Board Applications

AEM welcomes submissions from researchers across all disciplines within its scope – whether describing a formal mathematical framework, documenting the calibration of a long-standing model, sharing data, or presenting a new computational workflow. Authors are encouraged to contact the editors directly to discuss specific publication needs.

The journal also welcomes applications from editors worldwide who share AEM’s vision. Experts willing to actively contribute to this unique journal and its community are invited to get in touch via the journal website.

Agricultural and Environmental Modelling is the first journal designed around the full lifecycle of modelling research, from formal specification to calibration, implementation, and application. Every contribution is important; every contribution is citable; credit where credit is due.
commented the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Christopher Topping

The renaming reflects a natural evolution of the journal’s mission. Agricultural and Environmental Modelling better represents the breadth of work it publishes – spanning the full spectrum of modelling across agricultural, food, and environmental sciences – and reaffirms the journal’s founding commitment to Open Science and to recognising every stage of model development as rigorous scientific work in its own right.
added Pensoft’s founder and CEO, Prof. Lyubomir Penev

You can follow the journal on social media – Bluesky, Facebook and LinkedIn, and sign up for the journal’s email newsletter through the journal’s homepage.

Original sources:

Topping CJ, Nogoy N, Boyadzhieva I, Stoev P, Penev L (2026) A journal by modellers, for modellers: Introducing Agricultural and Environmental Modelling. Agricultural and Environmental Modelling 8: e194160. https://doi.org/10.3897/aem.8.194160

Singer A, Schmolke A, Becher MA, von Blanckenhagen F, van den Brink N, Grimm T, Ibrahim L, Imholt C, Jacob J, Jakoby O, Laucht S, Løvik AN, Martin T, Muñoz CC, Preuss TG, Galic N (2026) Concept for APODEMUS – a wood mouse population model for pesticide risk assessment. Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal 7: e175714. https://doi.org/10.3897/fmj.7.175714

Dubbed as ‘the most talked about paper’, the cautionary publication is suggested to have omitted a non-western view on inequality that impedes global sustainability

By pointing out the western lifestyle is not “the norm and end goal of societal evolution”, the research team of Dr Mohsen Kayal (University of Perpignan, France) contributes to the debate on the urgency of achieving sustainability, as ignited by the largely publicised article “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” published in BioScience in 2017. Their Response paper in the open-access journal Rethinking Ecology emphasizes that societies in developing countries are often more dependent on natural resources, while least responsible for the ecological crisis.

While expressing explicit support and endorsement for the call made in the original paper, the team argue that several of its recommendations “address symptoms rather than root causes”, while steering away from historical patterns and underlying drivers of the global socio-economic system, namely those relating to wealth inequality, human demography, and food production.

According to the researchers, the desired universal sustainability cannot be achieved in a situation of inequitable wealth distribution. They highlight the link between the consumerism and neocolonialism in the western society and the environmental declines. Meanwhile, communities in the developing world are much more vulnerable to ecological disasters and their homelands are being overexploited and compromised for the production of a major part of the commodities sold around the world.

Inequitable distribution is also evident in the ecological footprint of the western world as opposed to poorer regions. The team of Dr Mohsen Kayal question the appeal made in the Warning to Humanity paper that restricting birth rates is of primary concern when it comes to mitigating the anthropogenic effect on the planet. Rather, they argue that it is the excessive resource consumption and ecosystem-destructive practices observed in the western lifestyle that need to be prioritized.

Citing the 2017 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the authors note that there is indeed enough food being produced to meet the needs of even more people on Earth than there currently are. However, it is again the unequal distribution of resources that results in both hunger and obesity. In the meantime, the replacement of the current industrial model of agriculture with a suite of environmentally friendly practices (e.g. cover crops, diverse crop rotations), the adoption of ecologically-based farming and well-managed grazing could preserve soils and their properties, while also increasing yields, resilience to climate change and socio-economic development.

“Sustainability can only be achieved through prioritizing global ethics, including universal equality and respect for all forms of life,” conclude the authors of the Response paper. “Sustainable solutions to Earth’s socio-ecological crisis already exist, however humanity still needs to realize that pursuing the same practices that created these problems is not going to solve them.”

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Original source:

Kayal M, Lewis H, Ballard J, Kayal E (2019) Humanity and the 21st century’s resource gauntlet: a commentary on Ripple et al.’s article “World scientists’ warning to humanity: a second notice”. Rethinking Ecology 4: 21-30. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.4.32116

Tag: natural resources

Agricultural and Environmental Modelling (AEM): A New Chapter for Modelling Science Publishing