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Category: Journal thematic issue

EMS Thematic Issue on

The Future of Integrated Modelling Science and Technology

Issue Editors: Gerry Laniak and Andrea E. Rizzoli

Scope and aims

Understanding and managing environmental systems is becoming more and more critical for a planet facing increasing pressures on limited resources, and at the same time subject to climate variations and other changes. Historically the major focus has been on sectoral studies of largely disconnected aspects of environmental modeling (air pollution, hydrology, ecology, economics, and other social and human aspects). But in the interests of more holistic understanding and management scientists are now investigating how to better represent the various components of environmental systems and their interactions. This involves focusing on the appropriate simplification of complexities and characterising uncertainties in the integrated models and their predictions. It also involves engagement with interest groups to frame the focus of modelling exercises and integrate and share knowledge throughout the model development process.

Read more: The Future of Integrated Modelling Science and Technology

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Category: Journal thematic issue

Thematic Issue on

Expert Opinion in Environmental Management and Modelling

Issue Editors:

Tobias Krueger, Trevor Page, Laurence Smith, Alexey Voinov

To download this call for papers please go here.

Aim

Contributions are invited to a forthcoming thematic issue of Environmental Modelling & Software devoted to the role of expert opinion in environmental management and modelling.

Managing natural resources requires the integrated consideration of natural, social, economic and political systems. It has increasingly been realised that this goal is best achieved through stakeholder deliberation facilitated by interdisciplinary scientific analysis. The complexity of the relevant processes necessitates analytical tools collating different disciplinary perspectives for research and deliberation. Assembling such tools is an exceedingly complex task as the number of components to be considered increases with the variety of environmental, socio-economic and political factors that are relevant. Moreover, the evidence base of how each component is functioning varies in terms of quality. Confronting these challenges of complexity and uncertainty often requires looking beyond measured data and traditional computer models to harness many other forms of expert opinion for environmental management. At the same time, the term expert may then include not only scientists and practitioners but also other stakeholders and trusted observers. Engaging with experts, in turn, offers great opportunities for enhancing the deliberative management process.

While a previous thematic issue was focused on stakeholder participation (“Modelling with Stakeholders”), in this issue we are interested in the role of and input from experts in a very broad sense, including experts who may or may not be stakeholders in the process. We invite papers that take a detailed look at the level and nature of expert opinion behind existing tools to support environmental management and that highlight recent innovations. In particular, we are interested in contributions that can help answer some of the following questions:

• Which expert opinions are used implicitly when assembling scientific principles into mechanistic computer models?

• What are the tools that incorporate expert opinion explicitly, such as qualitative expert systems, decision trees, probabilistic networks, fuzzy systems etc.? How can we test and improve these?

• What are the methods of expert elicitation? How to assess and compare expertise, representativeness and uncertainty?

• Which elements of social learning may result from expert elicitation? Are there benefits for environmental management and governance?

• What is the distinction between experts and stakeholders? Do we treat them differently? When is a stakeholder an expert, and what makes an expert a stakeholder? How do they interact?

• Qualitative and quantitative expertise – what are the differences? How to merge the two in models and tools?

Structure

Papers developed around a RELU workshop on Expert Systems for Natural Resources Management held in January 2009[1] will be reviewed to form the backbone of the thematic issue. Additional relevant contributions are sought that tackle questions such as those stated above. We explicitly invite the papers that could not be considered for the previous thematic issue on Modelling with Stakeholders.

Participation and timeline

The editors would like to extend an open opportunity to the membership of iEMSs and the wider science community to participate in the development of the thematic issue, through either submitting or reviewing papers.

If you are interested in participating, please email your contact details and intended contribution (title, authors, abstract) to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . After an initial selection of responses, we will ask for full papers by 31 June 2010.

We will use a three step review process: (1) abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors and recommendations will be made regarding the scope of the full paper; (2) full papers will be sent out for external peer review following Environmental Modelling & Software policy; (3) revised manuscripts will be examined by the Guest Editors and, where necessary, the external reviewers.

Details

Category: Journal thematic issue

EMS Thematic Issue on

Innovative Approaches to Global Change Modelling

Issue Editors: Mark Borsuk, Carlo Giupponi, Klaus Hasselmann, and Bert de Vries

Scope and aims

Climate change is considered to be one of the biggest challenges facing humanity and is just one of the manifestations of the ever-faster evolutionary dynamics of the Earth system, referred to collectively as Global Change. An emerging feature of such dynamics is the strong interrelation between natural and socioeconomic drivers acting at multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Traditional disciplinary studies show evident limits in their capability to cope with the complexity of the Earth system and much of the current disciplinary and multidisciplinary modelling does not consider uncertainties adequately. Thus renewed efforts toward innovative approaches, models and evaluation of their strengths and limitations are needed. In particular, cross-fertilization between Complex Systems Science, Environmental Sciences and Socioeconomics is of great interest for this Thematic Issue. Examples of topics of interest include consideration of Bayesian approaches in consolidating and evaluating modelling streams, in-depth analysis of the behaviour of human agents, and the exploration of the ecology-economy interface with innovative system dynamics models.

Read more: Innovative Approaches to Global Change Modelling

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Category: Journal thematic issue

Thematic Issue on

Emulation techniques for the reduction and sensitivity analysis of complex environmental models

Issue Editors:

Marco Ratto, Andrea Castelletti

Aim

Contributions are invited to a forthcoming thematic issue of Environmental Modelling and Software devoted to survey assess and evaluate available emulation techniques for the analysis of complex environmental models.

This important and expanding area of research represents one of the major advances in the study of complex mathematical models, with applications ranging from sensitivity analysis to model reduction. Computational limitations remain a major barrier to the effective and systematic use of large-scale, process-based simulation models in rational environmental decision-making. Whereas complex models may provide clear advantages when the goal of the modelling exercise is to enhance our understanding of the natural processes, they introduce problems of model identifiability caused by over-parameterization and may not be the best choice for control, management and planning purposes, i.e. when any kind of feedback control, optimization or real-time forecasting is required. Therefore, a combination of techniques for complex model reduction with procedures for data assimilation and learning-based control could help to bridge the gap between science and practical decision-making.

This thematic issue aims at providing a guide and reference for modellers in choosing appropriate approaches and understanding their features. Also, it aims at producing an extensive validation and benchmarking of different emulation approaches, still lacking in the literature. Finally, the illustration of emulation approaches will be completed through the contribution of successful applications in environmental modeling.

The thematic issue will provide a useful benchmark in the academic literature for this important and expanding area of research, and will create an opportunity for dialogue between methodological and user focussed research.

Structure

One position paper will form the heart of the Thematic Issue: the position paper will be the final outcome of the Workshop W8. Complexity reduction strategies for effective use of process based models in environmental decision making, organized by Andrea Castelletti, Rodolfo Soncini-Sessa, Peter C. Young, Hoshin V. Gupta, Marco Ratto at the iEMSs2010 Congress (http://www.iemss.org/iemss2010/page31.html).

Further papers will then be published covering the following topic areas:

Methodology – The focus will be on, but not limited to, model complexity reduction techniques, such as dominant mode analysis, large model emulation and meta-modelling, response surfaces, diagnostic model evaluation, model structure and parameter estimation, model correction and, in the case of partial differential equations, methods such as stochastic collocation on sparse grids. Contributions on specific subtopics, such as design of experiments, factor screening, sparse grids, feature extraction, etc. are also welcome.

Validation and benchmarking – The aim will be to provide an extensive validation and benchmarking of different emulation approaches that can be adopted to attack the same sensitivity/reduction problem at hand. Both the use of analytic test cases and of real applications are welcome.

Application – Applications might include water resources, air quality, ecosystems, land use, energy efficiency, climate modelling and any other relevant environmental topic.

Participation and timeline

The editors would like to extend an open opportunity to the membership of iEMSs, participants to SAMO 2010 -- the conference on sensitivity analysis that will take place at Bocconi University in Milan on July 19-22, 2010, http://samo2010.unibocconi.it/ - and others in the development of the thematic issue, either through specific papers on one of the topics above or through reviewing any of the papers or in helping to write the dedicated position paper.

If you are interested in participating please email your contact details and intended participation (discussion paper, topic, title plus a very brief abstract (max. 1 page)) to

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. not later than 30. May 2010.

Note: After initial selection of responses, we will ask for full papers (approx. 20 pages double spaced lines) up to 31st October 2010.

We will use a three step review process: 1. abstracts of about one page will be reviewed by the Guest Editors, and recommendations will be then made for the scope of the full paper; 2. the full paper will undergo a constructive and comprehensive review process to ensure cohesiveness of the special issue and the best quality output; 3. revised manuscripts will be examined by the Guest Editors and, where necessary, the original reviewers.