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SUMMER 2024 NEWSLETTER

In this issue:

iEMSs 2026 in University College Dublin (UCD) Dublin, Ireland

We are delighted to announce that the 13th iEMSs conference will be convened by David Ayala-Cabrera and Soumyabrata Dev at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.


Dr David Ayala-Cabrera is an Assistant Professor at UCD, with a focus on civil engineering and environmental modelling. His research is dedicated to advancing sustainable infrastructure and improving water resource management.

Dr Soumyabrata Dev is an Assistant Professor at UCD, specialising in machine learning, computer vision, and remote sensing. His work is at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to address pressing global challenges, including climate change and environmental monitoring.

UCD is Ireland’s largest university, blending over 160 years of history with modern facilities. The conference venue will be O’Reilly Hall within the main campus within Dublin City. Dublin is well connected to direct routes from Europe and North America and the city is well-served by public transportation. The conference location will offer a good range of accommodation options ranging from university halls to near-by hotels.

We anticipate that Dublin and Ireland will be an attractive destination for Society members. The Irish are world renowned for their hospitality and Dublin is a city of contrasts, blending historic charm with modern sophistication.

Conference dates are yet to be confirmed (our preferred dates are waitlisted) but will be in late June or July. Please look out for an announcement soon!

We look forward to seeing you in Dublin!

iEMSs 2024 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA

From 23 to 27 June 2024, we gathered on the Michigan State University (MSU) campus in East Lansing to hold our 12th biennial conference with the overarching motto “Addressing Global Environmental Challenges Through Intelligent Modelling”. Our MSU colleagues had set up a great event with short connections between the meeting rooms and accommodation, and we were delighted to welcome more than 180 participants from 21 countries. On Sunday evening, we gathered for early registration and an icebreaker reception in the lovely outdoor grounds of the Kellogg Centre, and on Monday morning, we formally opened the conference with welcoming words from the MSU President and the Director of AgBioResearch, followed by a very engaging keynote presentation by Whitney Gravelle, President and member of the Executive Council of the Bay Mills Indian Community. Whitney focused on the most pressing environmental topics in Michigan and beyond from the perspective of an Indigenous community and the role that environmental science and modelling can play in finding solutions to these challenges.

Following a busy day of parallel sessions and workshops, we gathered for an opening reception. For the plenary session on Tuesday, we welcomed Barbara Robson, Leader of the Tropical Marine Water Quality and Impacts team at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, talking about ‘Assessing model “fitness for purpose” in the context of long-term change’. After a further set of parallel sessions and workshops, the iEMSs committee on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion met, and conference participants had the opportunity to meet the editors of SESMO and Environmental Modelling & Software to ask questions or discuss particular topics.

Our Wednesday was opened by another excellent keynote speaker, Mariana Rufino, Chair of Livestock Systems at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She elaborated on the topic of “Smart Grazing: digital tech and models to improve the sustainability of livestock” and gave us her insights into the role of environmental software and modelling in agriculture, with a wider view of current challenges. After more sessions and workshops, we all gathered at the MSU Football Stadium, home of the Spartans, for our banquet and used this occasion to honor our awardees of Fellowships, Early Career Research Excellence prizes and the Biennial Medals, which had been selected as usual in the odd year (Fellowships) and earlier in 2024 (ECREs and Medals). Here, we also announced that iEMSs 2026 will tentatively be held in Dublin, Ireland, with details yet to be finalized.

Our final day, Thursday, started without a plenary session, and after several more parallel sessions and workshops, we gathered for a joint lunch and presented the awards for the best student presentations before closing the 2024 iEMSs biennial conference.

#OSIRIS Survey on Computational Reproducibility

************************************************************************************

Elevate science by taking part in the #OSIRIS survey on computational reproducibility!

The EU-funded OSIRIS project aims to provide evidence-based solutions to support reproducibility in the scientific process. 

Computational reproducibility is an important aspect of the work. Considering the rapid development of digitalization, this survey aims to point out interesting details about recent practices, issues and challenges.

Researchers of the environmental modelling community are invited to contribute to the important topic of science reproducibility by filling the survey and by providing their views and insights.

Survey is available here: https://onlinekutatas.uni-mate.hu/index.php/617368?lang=en

Open until the end of Sept 2024.

*****************************************************************

Featured

iEMSs 2024 Student Awards

We had a large volume of excellent student presentations again at iEMSs 2024 and with the help of the session organisers and additional volunteer judges, awarded the following student prizes1 in East Lansing on the final day of the conference:

1st prize: Douglas Radford for „Process-based aggregation reduces dimensionality and enables surrogate model development: An application to wildfire risk modelling“

2nd prize: Palok Biswas for „Equity-Informed Multi-objective Optimization: Examining the Regional Distribution of Emission Control“

And a joint 3rd prize:
Samira Islam for „Tracking Leakage in Water Distribution Networks Using Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning, and GPR “
and
Jiayu Yao for “Water distribution system design under long-term uncertainty considering solar energy as a supplementary energy source”

We congratulate all awardees and will send a formal award certificate out to each of them in due course.

1) The awards will comprise the following:
1st prize – free registration at student’s preferred iEMSs, regional iEMSs or MODSIM and to be taken before the end of 2028.
2nd prize – €500 to be applied towards travel to iEMSs, regional iEMSs or MODSIM before the end of 2028.
3rd prize €250 to be applied towards travel to iEMSs, regional iEMSs or MODSIM before the end of 2028.

Featured

iEMSs Biennial General Meeting (BGM) 2024

Dear iEMSs Members,

To mark the transfer of leadership to the newly elected president, office and board, we invite all iEMSs members to participate in the iEMSs Biennial General Meeting, which we will organise on August 5, 2024 in two sessions to accommodate all member time zones to the extent possible. The first session will run at 6 a.m. UTC and the second session at 8 p.m. UTC. We will send out a detailed email with agenda and meeting registration (likely through ZOOM) in the next couple of weeks.

Please save the date and we look forward to meet virtually with many of you on this occasion.

With best regards, Val, Stefan & Takuya

Featured

iEMSs 2024 Awards presented

The iEMSs Board has confirmed the 2024 awards proposed by the Awards Committee and we have presented them at the iEMSs Biennial Conference in East Lansing to announce and celebrate outstanding contributions to the Society in the following categories:

Biennial Medals

  • Min Chen
  • Dan Ames
  • Tony Jakeman

Early Career Research Excellence Prizes (ECREs)

  • Lieke Melsen
  • Jeffrey Sadler
  • Jazmin Zatarain Salazar
  • Razi Sheikholeslami
Featured

SPRING 2024 NEWSLETTER

In this issue:

iEMSs 2024 Biennial Conference –

Abstract submissions extended to 19 April 2024

Call for Abstracts for iEMSs 2024, abstracts are currently being accepted. Deadline for submission has been extended to 19 April 2024! Submit Abstracts here:
https://proceedings.iemss.org/index.php/2024/about/submissions

Session convenors: please assess all abstracts as they are submitted.

To enable travel decisions based on an accepted submission, please consider submitting your abstracts as soon as possible.

As a quick reminder and background: the iEMSs Board and Office have decided to move to a model with extended abstracts (max. 2 pages including references) only. This is because there is substantial additional effort required to manage the review process and to ensure that conference proceedings were edited and made available online open access in an acceptable amount of time. Download figures for full conference papers, and the major hurdles of getting proceedings and full papers of a comparatively smaller conference indexed in Web of Science or Scopus did not justify that effort. In addition, we are publishing SESMO, our full open access journal, and edit Environmental Modelling and Software, which provide excellent outlets for full manuscripts which may emerge from iEMSs biennial conferences. Specific communications around opportunities for special issues and general submissions to both journals in the context of iEMSs 2024 as an excellent venue for publishing full manuscripts will be made in due course.

We will gather feedback after the 2024 conference and report back to the new Office and Board to be elected next year to review this approach in time for the 2026 conference and beyond.

Secondly, after working with several different conference management and abstract handling systems over the years, we have decided to invest some efforts in setting up the Open Journal System (OJS), which is used as well to publish SESMO. Along with setting up a persistent conference website as part of the iEMSs domain, the plan is to trial OJS for the 2024 conference, gather feedback and learning points, and if all goes well, we will go with this setup for all future conferences. This will have several benefits, including the ease of generating open access proceedings directly in the iEMSs online presence and close to, if not even before the actual conference. In addition, it would give abstract authors, session organisers and stream convenors the same user experience every time, without the need to adapt to a new system again and again.

We will be working with session organisers and stream convenors as we run this new setup for a first time in the run up to June. We may hit a bump or two and experience some hiccups, but the potential advantages operating our own setup will streamline our conference organization in the future and benefit local organisers and scientific committees going forward.

iEMSs REGISTRATION – Early Bird extended to 26 April 2024

Registration for the event is now open. You can register by visiting: https://events.anr.msu.edu/iEMSs/. Registration includes the iEMSs 2 year membership fee, program materials, and several meals and beverages throughout the event. An outline of the membership fees are below:

Professional Online Registration

  • Early Bird Registration: US$795 (until 26 April 2024)
  • Regular Registration: US$995 (27 April 2024 to 2 June 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$1195 (3 June 2024 to 19 June 2024)

Student Online Registration

  • Early Bird Registration: US$395 (until 26 April 2024)
  • Regular Registration: US$595 (27 April 2024 to 2 June 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$795 (3 June 2024 to 19 June 2024)

To learn more or register visit: https://conference.iemss.org/

iEMSs Elections

Elections Committee is holding elections to constitute a new Office and Board according to the Bylaws Articles V, VI and VII.

 Positions

The following positions are open for nominations:

(up to) 7 members of iEMSS Office

  • 1 iEMSs President;
  • 1 iEMSs Secretary;
  • 1 iEMSs Treasurer;
  • 4 iEMSs Vice-Presidents.

The iEMSs Secretary and the iEMSs Treasurer may be the same person.

  AND

  • 8-25 members of iEMSs Board.

Nominations

Nominations for the positions are invited to be submitted via online Form on the iEMSs website (https://iemss.org/home/elections2024-nominations/) during the period March 15th – April 15th, 2024. Please provide information about the candidate, including a short bio and motivation to run for the Board/Office.  Candidates for the Board are required to specify their previous contributions to the Society. Candidates for the Office are expected to additionally indicate specific areas of intended contribution to the society as an officer. Self-nominations are possible.

Terms of members of the iEMSs Board and the iEMSs Office will be two years… Nominees are expected to have contributed actively to society activities and functions. Service contributions can include service as a session organizer, participation as an editor of the iEMSs conference proceedings, input as a group or thread moderator, and notable other efforts for the general benefit of the society” (Bylaws Article V.5).

Nominations for the iEMSs Office will also be considered as nominations for the iEMSs Board.

The candidate details will be made available online to all members of the iEMSs prior to the opening of the voting period.  

Electronic vote

Each active member of iEMSs will be invited to cast their vote through online Form (by login to the iEMSs website) during the period between April 30th and May 15th, 2024. The results of the vote will be validated by the Elections Committee and reported to the iEMSs President prior to the General Meeting and announced at the General Meeting during iEMSs 2024 Congress in East Lansing, Michigan, including the date for constituting the new Office to take over operations of iEMSs, as well as via email to the iEMSs membership.

Featured

Congratulations to the 2023 iEMSs Fellows

We are delighted to announce, that following nominations and evaluation by our awards committee, the following new iEMSs Fellowships have been awarded:

  • Dr. Nagesh Kolagani, who is a Professor at the School of Engineering and Technology, Centurion University of Technology and Management, India
  • Dr. Ibrahim Demir, Robert and Virginia Wheeler Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Iowa

We look forward to celebrate the two fellows along with other awardees at our upcoming biennial conference in East Lansing in June, but I would like to express my gratitude for their support of iEMSs and the field of environmental modelling and software over many years already now.

Office

The iEMSs Office (2024-2026)

President 

Val Snow, AgResearch, New Zealand

Secretary

Takuya Iwanaga, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Australia

Treasurer

Ioannis Athanasiadis, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Vice -presidents

  • Marina Erechtchoukova, York University, Canada
  • Min Chen, Nanjing Normal University, China
  • Peter Khaiter, York University, Canada
  • Sondoss Elsawah, UNSW, Australia

Arbitrators

Carlo Lepori, IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland
Andrea-Emilio Rizzoli
, IDSIA USI/SUPSI, Switzerland

The iEMSs Board and the iEMSs Office are in charge for 2 years, new elections will be held in 2024, before the iEMSs 2024 biennial meeting.

Past-presidents

2020-2024 Stefan Reis, UKCEH, United Kingdom

2016-2020 Dan Ames, Brigham Young University, United States

2012-2016: Andrea Emilio Rizzoli, IDSIA, Switzerland

2008-2012: Alexey Voinov, ITC, U Twente, The Netherlands

2004-2008: Giorgio Guariso, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, EU

2000-2004: Anthony J. Jakeman, Australian National University, Australia.

Board

The iEMSs Board of Directors (2024-2026)

In addition to the Office members, the following iEMSs members compose the Board of Directors:

  • Dan Ames
  • Ioannis Athanasiadis
  • Susan Cuddy
  • Karina Gibert
  • Tony Jakeman
  • Chris Knightes
  • Junzhi Liu
  • Pouyan Nejadhashemi
  • Cheng-Zhi Qin
  • Saman Razavi
  • Stefan Reis
  • Andrea Rizzoli
  • Wenyan Wu
  • Fengyuan Zhang

The iEMSs Board  are in charge for 2 years, new elections will be held in 2026, prior to the Biennial Meeting.

SPRING 2024 NEWSLETTER 2

In this issue:

iEMSs Elections: Vote by 28 May 2024

Please cast your votes by May 28th midnight CEST.

Use this form:  https://iemss.org/home/elections2024/

As a reminder: 

Elections Timeline

March 8th – Circulate Information Letter # 1 to membership
March 15th – Call for nominations opens
April 22nd – Closing date for nominations
May 5th – Open the online form for vote casting
May 28th – Closing date for election votes
June 10th – Finalize results of elections

June 26th – Announcement of the election results at the Biennial Conference in Michigan and on the iEMSs website

iEMSs REGISTRATION – Regular Registration ends 2 June 2024

Registration for the event is now open. Regular registration ends 2 June 2024You can register by visiting: https://events.anr.msu.edu/iEMSs/. Registration includes the iEMSs 2 year membership fee, program materials, and several meals and beverages throughout the event. An outline of the membership fees are below:

Professional Online Registration

  • Regular Registration: US$995 (27 April 2024 to 2 June 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$1195 (3 June 2024 to 19 June 2024)

Student Online Registration

  • Regular Registration: US$595 (27 April 2024 to 2 June 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$795 (3 June 2024 to 19 June 2024)

To learn more or register visit: https://conference.iemss.org/

WINTER 2024 NEWSLETTER 2

In this issue:

iEMSs 2024 Biennial Conference – Call for Abstracts

We are delighted to open the Call for Abstracts for iEMSs 2024, which you can find here:
https://proceedings.iemss.org/index.php/2024/about/submissions

The final deadline for abstract submission is 5 April 2024, which will give you all ample time to prepare and submit your abstracts. However, we ask the session convenors to assess all abstracts as they are submitted and to enable you to make travel decisions based on an accepted submission, please consider submitting your abstracts as soon as possible.

As a quick reminder and background: the iEMSs Board and Office have decided to move to a model with extended abstracts (max. 2 pages including references) only. The main reason for this has been the substantial additional effort required to manage the review process and to ensure that conference proceedings were edited and made available online open access in an acceptable amount of time. Download figures for full conference papers, and the major hurdles of getting proceedings and full papers of a comparatively smaller conference indexed in Web of Science or Scopus did not justify that effort. In addition, we are publishing SESMO, our full open access journal, and edit Environmental Modelling and Software, which provide excellent outlets for full manuscripts which may emerge from iEMSs biennial conferences. Specific communications around opportunities for special issues and general submissions to both journals in the context of iEMSs 2024 as an excellent venue for publishing full manuscripts will be made in due course.

We will gather feedback after the 2024 conference and report back to the new Office and Board to be elected next year to review this approach in time for the 2026 conference and beyond.

Secondly, after working with several different conference management and abstract handling systems over the years, we have decided to invest some efforts in setting up the Open Journal System (OJS), which is used as well to publish SESMO. Along with setting up a persistent conference website as part of the iEMSs domain, the plan is to trial OJS for the 2024 conference, gather feedback and learning points, and if all goes well, we will go with this setup for all future conferences. This will have several benefits, including the ease of generating open access proceedings directly in the iEMSs online presence and close to, if not even before the actual conference. In addition, it would give abstract authors, session organisers and stream convenors the same user experience every time, without the need to adapt to a new system again and again.

We will be working with session organisers and stream convenors as we run this new setup for a first time in the run up to June. We may hit a bump or two and experience some hiccups, but the potential advantages operating our own setup will streamline our conference organization in the future and benefit local organisers and scientific committees going forward.

IAMES2024

3rd IFAC Workshop on Integrated Assessment Modeling for Environmental Systems, Savona, Italy, 29-31 May 2024.

IAMES2024 is the third workshop focused on environmental modelling and integrated impact assessment that will be organized at the Savona Campus of the University of Genova. These topics generally involve scientists from different disciplines, enterprises, policy makers, and other stakeholders for monitoring, management, and planning of environmental systems, and it finds application in multiple domains (risk management, pollution, social and life sciences, economics, power and energy, circular economy, …) in an integrated way.

More information at: https://iames.unige.it/

Key Dates

  • Special Session proposal: 15 February 2024
  • Regular papers submission deadline: 29 February 2024
  • Discussion papers submission deadline 15 March 2024