CoP ForestDSS News September 2019
This is the September 2019 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 and future activities of the CoP:
We will organize the next annual ForestDSS Council meeting as a side event of the IUFRO World Congress " Forest Research and Cooperation for Sustainable Development" that takes place in Curitiba, Brazil from 27th September - 5th of October 2019. The IUFRO World Congress will bring together international experts in the area of forest research and there will be special sessions organized in the field of decision support for forest management. The ForestDSS Council is constituted of those DSS experts that participate in the annual meeting of the CoP. It is a temporary group which acts as a review panel for the activity of the whole CoP. Please consider your participation in this side event, when you are travelling to Curitiba. We would like to use this opportunity to have an exchange about the ongoing research and dissemination activities. The meeting will take place on Tuesday the 1st of October 2019 from 18:30-19:20 in the room R10 - WING 2 as part of the business meeting of the IUFRO group 4.03.00 (Information, modeling and statistics).
Jan Kaspar - who was nominated as the new coordinator of the CoP during the last Council meeting in Prague according to the MoU of the CoP - will organize the next Council meeting in Curitiba. Harald Vacik (former coordinator of the CoP) will support the future activities of the CoP as vice-coordinator.
Other DSS related conferences:
Several conferences were organized this year, which allowed strengthening collaboration and outreaching by the DSS community. There are already the call for papers out for conferences scheduled in 2020 (e.g. ICDSST2020, EURO Working Group Practice of OR) - There is also a International Winter School on Big Data scheduled for next year - so please consider to participate in the conferences and track information about the latest call for abstracts and get to know about interesting conferences at the news and events page of the CoP. You can get the latest information via the RSS feed directly to your mail box or you follow us via twitter @dss_forest as well.
Special Issues in journals
New publications and tools
We have updated the list of publications related to Forest DSS on the Community portal including the most recent publications in the field of decision support. This is a valuable source for conducting reviews in the field of Forest Management Decision Support Systems. You are welcome to screen the list of publications and add you most recent paper as well!
We have included a review about the project LANDSUPPORT which aims at building up a web-based smart geoSpatial Decision Support System (S-DSS). LANDSUPPORT shall provide a set of operational tools devoted to: i) support sustainable agriculture and forestry; ii) evaluate trade-off between land uses; iii) contribute to implementation, impact and delivery of about 20 European land policies and selected 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals including climate change resilience goals. Read more....
You might be also interested to learn about Biowood - a large project that focuses on (i) quantifying the current woody biomass feedstock supply in Flanders, (ii) predicting the future woody biomass in Flanders using the Sim4Tree decision support system (DSS), (iii) creating added value for wood flows based on a lignin-first process opening up opportunities for using the new derived molecules in the agro-industry and (iv) evaluating the sustainability of the lignin-first derived products including optimising locations of the biorefineries using the MooV DSS. Read more....
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 in 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.
In the last months a number of new members joined the Community of Practice and we welcome them all: Ilié Storms from KU Leuven, Gina Marano from the CRISP Research Center, Anders Lundholm from the University College Dublin, or Carola Paul from the University of Goettingen among many others. We are happy about their involvement in the CoP and warmly welcome the new members - for a full list of all CoP members please consult the Search on the Website.
