CoP ForestDSS News May 2016
This is the May 2015 newsletter of the Community of Practice (CoP) on Forest Management Decision Support Systems sent to all registered members. We would like to update you on the recent developments in the CoP:
Conferences and call for papers:
The seminar “Models and decision support tools for integrated forest policy development under global change’ took place in February 18, 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal. It was organized in the framework of the project ‘SuFoRun’ supported by a Marie Skodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange. SuFoRun focuses on forestry and climate change interactions, including the development of adaptive forest management tools. Read more...
There are several conferences organized this year, which allow strengthening collaboration and outreaching by the DSS community. In most of the conferences the members of the CoP are actively engaged:
The ICDSST 2016 will be organized by the EURO Working Group on Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS) in co-operation with University of Plymouth, UK, during 23-25 May 2016. The main purpose of the International Conference on Decision Support System Technology (ICDSST 2016), with its main theme on “Decision Support Systems Addressing Societal Challenges”, is to attract researchers, developers and specialists in the related areas of decision making, including its methodologies and technologies, as well as application oriented practitioners directed to the implementation of solutions for societal challenges. Jose Borges, Jan Kašpar and Harald Vacik are organizing the session "'The use of DSS in forest resources management and policy analysis" as part of the ICDSST 2016 conference. Read more …
You are also invited to take part in the 28th European Conference on Operational Research (EURO XXVIII) at Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland. The EURO 2016 Conference will take place from July 3-6, 2016. The Program and Organizing Committees chaired by Daniele Vigo and Joanna Jzefowska, are preparing a high quality scientific program and an exciting social program for the Conference. The EURO XXVIII Conference will be an excellent opportunity for the OR community to get together again in a pleasant atmosphere. Read more …
Please consider participating in the 8th International Congress on Environmental Modelling & Software (iEMSs 2016) Toulouse, France from 10-14 July 2016. The theme for the conference is "Supporting Sustainable Futures"and a lot of exciting new developments and tools for supporting our future are expected. Read more …
The final conference of the COST Action ORCHESTRA “Bioeconomy and ecosystem services, synergy or conflict? Horizontal and vertical policy analysis, modelling and orchestration in practice” will take place from 5-6 September 2016, in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and will focus on the interface between bioeconomy and ecosystem services. ORCHESTRA aims at supporting the coherence of forest-related policy targets and efficiency of policy measures. The call for abstracts is still open and invites contributions about models that support the selection of policy targets or could be orchestrated to support the policy decisions related to bioeconomy and ecosystem services. Read more ...
There are many more conferences scheduled for 2016 - you are able to track the latest call for papers and get to know about interesting conferences at the news and events page of the CoP.
New DSS developments
Forest Research has been developing a new version of its decision support platform using a suite of open source geospatial web technologies to support a broad range of users across the forestry sector. This was particularly important with Ecological Site Classification (ESC), a Forest Research decision support tool that advises on tree species choice according to climatic and edaphic(soil) variables. More information can be found here.
The Terrestrial Condition Assessment (TCA) of the National Forest System (NFS, USDA Forest Service) is using the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system to assess effects of uncharacteristic stressors and disturbance agents, with an emphasis on identifying restoration opportunities at national and regional scales. EMDS is a spatial decision support system for landscape analysis and planning. More information can be found here.
The Heureka system developed at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) that allows the user to perform a large amount of different analysis and to create forest management plans (see http://www.forestdss.org/wiki/index.php?title=Heureka and http://www.slu.se/heureka) has some updates. The system can perform short and long term projections of timber, economy, environmental conservation, recreation and carbon sequestration. It is used by all larger forest companies in Sweden (~40 % of productive forest land) and by many mid and small sized forest owners. More information can be found here
Call for project proposals
Several calls are currently open for developing a joint application in the field of decision support. Here are listed three topics that might be of interest to initialize collaboration
- Call for proposals on "Sustainable forests for the society of the future"
- Call for policies and decision tools for an integrated management of natural resources
- Call for coordinated integrated pest management in Europe
New publications
The list of publications is steadily growing and allows a good overview about forest DSS related papers. The most recent papers of members of the CoP are always highlighted on the main page of the CoP. you might have an interest to check the list of publications. For instance there was the updated and expanded second edition of the book "Decision Support for Forest Management" edited by Kangas, A., Kurttila, M., Hujala, T., Eyvindson, K., Kangas, J. published in the Springer Series Managing Forest Ecosystems which adds the most recent advances in participatory planning approaches and methods, giving special emphasis to decision support tools usable under uncertainty.
Also the recent papers by Thiele & Nuske (2016) Design and implementation of a web-based decision support system for climate change impact assessment on forests and Nobre et al. (2016) The Use of Decision Support Systems in Forest Management: Analysis of FORSYS Country Reports are nice examples for the ongoing research activities in the field of forest management decision support.
New members
In the last months a number of new members joined the Community of Practice and we welcome them all: Ronju Ahammad from Charles Darwin Institute (RIEL) (Australia), Bahman Foumani from the University of Guilan, Faculty of Natural Resources, Forestry Department (Iran), Manoj Kumar from the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun (India) İnci ÇAĞLAYAN from the Faculty of Forestry at the Istanbul University (Turkey), Eduard Hildt from the Faculty of Forestry at the National University of Misiones (Argentinia), Dimitri Justeau from the Institut Agronomique in Néo-Calédonien among many others. We are happy about their involvement in the CoP and warmly welcome the new members - Here are only some new members with their affiliation highlighted - for more details on all members please refer to the search page
In case that you would like to share your activties and your DSS related projects with the community, please provide us with a short notice, so that we are able to include the information in the portal and the next newsletter. Please check out the website for further announcements via the (news and events pages) or follow the latest discussions at the (community pages).
