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iEMSs

WINTER 2023 NEWSLETTER 1

December 19, 2023

In this issue:

iEMSs 2024 Biennial Conference – Registration open

Michigan State University is excited to welcome you to East Lansing, Michigan and beyond. Whether you’re an outdoor enthusiast, an urban adventurer, or somewhere in between, Michigan has it all and summer is the perfect time to visit.

We look forward to hosting an amazing 12th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs) that creates an environment for meaningful learning and networking. We hope you will take the time to enjoy all that Michigan has to offer.

To learn more about this event, visit: https://conference.iemss.org/

CONFERENCE VENUE AND LODGING

IEMSs will take place at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center (219 S Harrison Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824), located in the heart of Michigan State University’s lush and welcoming campus. This facility offers comfortable and convenient accommodations in addition to the primary meeting space for the event.

Additional lodging accommodations are available at the nearby Graduate Hotel, a short 15 minute walk from the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center or at the Brody Dormitory Lodging and Café, conveniently located across the street.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE – June 23 – 27, 2024

A tentative event schedule can be found online at https://conference.iemss.org/schedule/.

The conference schedule has been designed to offer both structured and more relaxed networking opportunities for attendees to build and enhance partnerships. Your support and engagement will help enhance the experience of the attendees and to help solve our global environmental challenges.

REGISTRATION

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 April 5 2024)
  • Regular Registration: US$995 (April 6 2024 to June 2 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$1195 (June 3 2024 to June 19 2024)

Student Online Registration

  • Early Bird Registration: US$395 (until April 5 2024)
  • Regular Registration: US$595 (April 6 2024 to June 2 2024)
  • Late Registration: US$795 (June 3 2024 to June 19 2024)

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

Conference Streams

  • Stream A. Decision making and public participation in environmental modelling
  • Stream B. Modeling environmental fate of contaminants, human well-being and ecological public health
  • Stream C. Computational methods, workflows, informatics and integrated systems in environmental modelling
  • Stream D. System design, identification and uncertainty in modelling complex environmental & agricultural systems
  • Stream E. Socio-environmental systems modelling for planetary health and environmental sustainability
  • Stream F. (Big) data solutions for environmental systems planning, management, and operation

Please share and advertise the conference widely in your networks! The streams, sessions and workshops are made available on the conference website here: https://conference.iemss.org/streams/

Prepare for the call for abstracts

iEMSs 2024 will come with some changes that have been long coming. Firstly, the iEMSs Board and Office have decided to move to a model with extended abstracts 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. 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.

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 intend to open the call for abstracts first thing in January 2024 and ask all iEMSs 2024 authors, session organisers and stream convenors for their support and patience 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.

In the meantime, you can already prepare your abstracts and get ready for submission in January with the template, which you can find on the conference website here. Or directly as .docx or .rft.

SUMMER 2023 NEWSLETTER

September 7, 2023

In this issue:

Update on iEMSs 2024 Conference

The 12th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software, “Addressing Global Environmental Challenges through Intelligent Modeling!” is less than a year away! iEMSs 2024 will be held in East Lansing, Michigan, June 23 – 27, 2024. Session proposals have been received and the program is being organized. Call for abstracts will be coming out this fall. Further details will be available at https://iemss.org/ and https://conference.iemss.org/.

  • Stream A. Decision making and public participation in environmental modelling
  • Stream B. Modeling environmental fate of contaminants, human well-being and ecological public health
  • Stream C. Computational methods, workflows, informatics and integrated systems in environmental modelling
  • Stream D. System design, identification and uncertainty in modelling complex environmental & agricultural systems
  • Stream E. Socio-environmental systems modelling for planetary health and environmental sustainability
  • Stream F. (Big) data solutions for environmental systems planning, management, and operation

Please share and advertise the conference widely in your networks! We look forward to seeing you all in East Lansing next year.

2nd AP Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems – Call for Papers

The 2nd AP SDEWES Conference will be dedicated to the improvement and dissemination of knowledge on methods, policies and technologies for increasing the sustainability of development by de-coupling growth from natural resources and replacing them with knowledge based economy, taking into account its economic, environmental and social pillars. Conference will be head April 2 – 5, 2024 in Gold Coast, Australia. For more information: http://goldcoast2024.sdewes.org/index.

SESMO Compendium on “Fundamentals of Modelling, Principles and Good Practice”

A joint special issue on Good Modelling Practice is being shared with three journals: Environmental Modelling and Software, Ecological Modelling and Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling. Some details are on each of the journals’ websites and are in the attached in terms of scope – which can be very wide such as considering the whole modelling cycle, or methods or applications for any part of the cycle. Below are the Guest Editors, one from each of the journals. They will be across all submissions. There is some flexibility about the timing but Tony Jakeman would be very pleased to receive an abstract or even a suggestion of what you might cover in a submission so the proposed topic can be discussed.

Guest Editors

Tony Jakeman, SESMO         tony.jakeman@anu.edu.au

Sondoss Elsawah, EMS         s.elsawah@adfa.edu.au

Hsiao-Hsuan (Rose) Wang, ECOMOD     Hsiaohsuan.Wang@ag.tamu.edu

Which journal to publish in?

Authors can submit to one of the three journals but only one must be chosen. It is envisaged that manuscripts will be reviewed and assessed by the relevant journal selected by the author(s) and Guest Editors will be across all manuscript processes.

Deadlines for submission

Enquiries and Abstracts of 500 words as soon as possible to any of the three Guest Editors above. Full papers due February 28, 2024.

Upcoming Fall Webinar

We are currently developing plans for the next webinar, tentatively scheduled for 27 October 2023. Further details will be shared in the fall newsletter, on twitter, and at https://iemss.org.

One year to go to iEMSs 2024

June 23, 2023

Dear iEMSs Members and Friends,

We are just a year away from our next Biennial Conference, which will take place in East Lansing, Michigan, hosted by your colleagues at MSU. You can find more information on the conference on the website here, and we will keep updating this site with all the details as they emerge. Make sure you mark your calendars for next year.

We are still calling for workshop proposals and are currently assessing all session proposals received, to put together an exciting programme for everyone. Registration for the conference and the call for abstracts will open after the summer. So please watch this space and get in touch with us if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Please share and advertise the conference widely in your networks! We look forward to seeing you all in East Lansing next year.

iEMSs 2024 – Call for Workshops

May 29, 2023

We are now open for submissions of workshop proposals for the iEMSs 2024 biennial conference, which will be held in East Lansing, Michigan. You will find early details of the event on the new iEMSs conference website here, which we will be using for all further conferences. 

A list of thematic streams which could be used to align your workshop proposals to can be found here: https://conference.iemss.org/streams/ 

The proposal form is here and we will close the session proposal period on July 15, 2023. 

Please contact me for any questions or suggestions regarding the 2024 conference, which we will discuss with the Organizing Committee and Scientific Programme Committee. In particular, we would like to ask you to consider any potential sponsors or contributions from other organisations or associations, for instance in connection to organising a workshop or a side event alongside iEMSs 2024 as early as possible. 

SPRING 2023 NEWSLETTER

April 13, 2023

In this issue:

Call for Session Proposals for iEMSs 2024

Session proposals are being accepted for the 12th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software, “Addressing Global Environmental Challenges through Intelligent Modeling!” to be held in East Lansing, Michigan, June 23 – 27, 2024. Session proposals are due by 30 April 2023. Sessions can be submitted here. Streams include:

  • Stream A. Decision making and public participation in environmental modelling
  • Stream B. Modeling environmental fate of contaminants, human well-being and ecological public health
  • Stream C. Computational methods, workflows, informatics and integrated systems in environmental modelling
  • Stream D. System design, identification and uncertainty in modelling complex environmental & agricultural systems
  • Stream E. Socio-environmental systems modelling for planetary health and environmental sustainability
  • Stream F. (Big) data solutions for environmental systems planning, management, and operation

iEMSs Awards

The iEMSs acknowledges research excellence and service to the Society periodically awarding Medals (biennial, even years), Fellowships (biennial, odd years) and Early Career Research Excellence (ECRE) awards (biennial, even years). There will be a call for Fellow nominations soon.

At iEMSs 2022, the iEMSs Board presented the following awards:

  • Biennial Medals: Tatjana Filatova, Marcus Janssen, Giorgio Mannina
  • Fellowships: Ann van Griensven, Serena Hamilton, Peter Khaiter, Jiri Nossent, Willem Vervoort
  • Early Career Research Excellence Prizes (ECREs): Takuya Iwanaga, Firouzeh Taghikhah, Wenyan Wu.

SESMO Compendium on “Fundamentals of Modelling, Principles and Good Practice”

With the support of its publisher iEMSs, our open access, community-driven journal SESMO is embarking on a Compendium on Fundamentals of Modelling and Good Practices. It will be a series of special issues with online materials. For more information, see sesmo.org/compendium. Interested contributors please contact Serena.Hamilton@anu.edu.au

WINTER 2023 NEWSLETTER

February 13, 2023

In this issue:

iEMSs Webinar Series

Winter iEMSs webinar this week:

Use of Systems Thinking Archetypes in Socio-Environmental Modeling

Wednesday 15 February 13:00 – 14:30 (EST UTC -5), 19:00 – 20:30 (CET UTC +1), Thursday February 16 5:00 – 6:30 (AEDT UTC +11) . For this webinar, iEMSs will be teaming up with SESYNC (National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center) and TIAS (The Integrated Assessment Society). Register here.

Solving problems of sustainability requires understanding social and environmental systems as being tightly coupled. Each system’s individual components, or parts, interact in complex ways, and feedbacks—or how change in one part of the system affects other system parts—determine the dynamics of socio-environmental systems (SES). Archetypes are a useful tool that can provide insights into a system’s dynamics and facilitate development of formal system models.Archetype analysis can reveal patterns that commonly plague SES, as well as strategies for achieving sustainability
across heterogeneous contexts. With its particular focus on using feedback loops as the leverage point for solving sustainability problems, the use of archetypes is growing in research and management.
This webcast will introduce the concept of archetypes, discuss some of the most common archetypes including their application in research, and describe how the use of archetypes can facilitate the socio-environmental modeling process.
This is part of a series of webinars on socio-environmental modeling, initially based on the article, “Eight Grand Challenges of Socio-Environmental Modelling.”
Host: Margaret Palmer, Director, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, USA
Presenter: Sondoss Elsawah, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia
Panelists:
Laura Schmitt Olabisi, Professor, Michigan State University, USA
Juan Rocha, Research Scientist, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden
Renee Obringer, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Previous Webinars are available online: iEMSs YouTube

iEMSs 2024

12th International Congress on Environmental Modelling & Software. Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, USA Save the dates: June 23 to June 27, 2024

FALL 2022 NEWSLETTER

September 15, 2022

In this issue:

iEMSs Webinar Series

The iEMSs webinar series continues this fall, scheduled for 29 November 15:00 – 16:30 (EST UTC -5). For this webinar, iEMSs will be teaming up with SESYNC (National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, https://www.sesync.org/).

“Selecting a Modeling Approach for Addressing a Socio-Environmental Problem” moderated by Dr. Sondoss Elsawah. Dr. Serena Hamilton (Research Fellow at the Institute for Water Futures at the Australian National University) will provide a general overview of the issue followed by discussion by the following panelists: Kirsten Oleson (Professor of Ecological Economics with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), David Wrathall (Associate Professor of Natural Hazards at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences) and Hedwig van Delden (Director of the Research Institute for Knowledge Systems (RIKS) in the Netherlands and Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide).

Previous Webinars are available online: iEMSs YouTube

iEMSs 2024

12th International Congress on Environmental Modelling & Software. Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, USA Save the dates: June 23 to June 27, 2024

iEMSs Online Presence

We are working on improving our online presence.

  • Follow us on twitter! @iEMSsNews, which provides up-to-date society information
  • Quarterly newsletters are designed to keep society members informed. Please email outreach@iemss.org if you would like us to post something to the general iEMSs community, e.g., job announcements, and include in the newsletter
  • We are working on updating our YouTube site, where previous presentations and webinars will be kept available.
  • Twitter, Linked-in, and YouTube are all accessible from the iEMSs website

SIMULTECH Partnership

iEMSs is working with INSTICC (Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication, https://portal.insticc.org/) to foster collaborations and support, particularly with SIMULTECH (Simulation Modeling Methodologies, Technologies, and Applications, https://simultech.scitevents.org). Details will follow.

SESMO Update (Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, https://sesmo.org)

Special Issues

There are several special issues underway that are still open for submission.

  • Indigenous and local perspectives in citizen science and participatory modelling of socio-ecological systems: approaches and tools [open]
  • Sensitivity Analysis of Model Output [open]
  • Participatory and cross-scale modelling of social-ecological systems (SESs) in the
  • Anthropocene [open]
  • Large-scale behavioural models of land use change [in progress]

Compendium on Fundamentals of Modelling and Good Practice

Please get in touch with Tony.Jakeman@anu.edu.au or S.Elsawah@adfa.edu.au if you think you would like to contribute to the Compendium. In summary, its features are

  • Introductory overview type papers covering the fundamentals of modelling and best practices
  • Open/ongoing virtual issue composed of many modules for SES modelling
  • Learning resource for lecturers and students with online materials in a repository
  • Papers and other teaching material (tutorials, worksheets, case study examples) – all citable

Working towards an Impact Factor

Our application for Web of Science listing is underway where we have made substantial progress on an ISSN, DOI, Publication ethics, and Plagiarism & Peer Review policies.

This is your community journal. We encourage members and others to submit their manuscripts for constructive reviewing by our excellent Editorial Board. No other journal has its specific niche.

Two new Editors

Sondoss Elsawah has joined Tony Jakeman as Editor-in-Chief. Serena Hamilton is our new Managing Editor in place of Ioannis Athanasiadis who will remain in support. Many thanks to Ioannis for all his utmost diligence and collegiality in setting up SESMO. Welcome to both Sondoss and Serena who are proven outstanding in their roles.

Faculty Position Announcement

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN GLOBAL LAND USE MODELING BASED ON COMPUTATIONAL GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELS

​Location: AMSTERDAM                 FTE: 0.8 – 1

Land use change is both a cause and consequence of Global Environmental Change, but at the same time it can also be a solution to environmental and social challenges. Given the strong global interconnections (telecoupling) through the trade of goods, commodities and services, local actions often have consequences in other world regions. Computational General Equilibrium models (CGE) are a tool to analyze these connections and evaluate the global impacts of policies and other interventions. Many sustainability interventions and policies affect land use, both locally and globally. The Associate Professor will build a research line that uses global scale models (preferably CGE modelling) to analyze how land use is changing in response to supply chain commitments such as zero-deforestation commitments, land use policies and other interventions. The successful candidate is expected to use and further develop the land use representation of large-scale models to enable the simulation of alternative policies affecting land use (practices) and their contributions to global sustainability goals.

For more information: https://workingat.vu.nl/ad/sectorgelden-cgemodeller/wp51wl

Office

July 15, 2022

The iEMSs Office (2022-2024)

President 

Stefan Reis, DLR Projektträger, Germany

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
  • Nigel W.T. Quinn, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, United States
  • Andrea Rizzoli, IDSIA USI-SUPSI, Switzerland

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

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

July 15, 2022

The iEMSs Board of Directors (2022-2024)

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

  • Alexandrov, Georgii
  • Ames, Daniel
  • Cuddy, Susan
  • Jakeman, Anthony
  • Jian, Jiping
  • Khaiter, Peter
  • Knightes, Christopher
  • Kolagani, Nagesh
  • Liu, Junzhi
  • Mannina, Giorgio
  • Nejadhashemi, Pouyan
  • Qin, Chengzhi
  • Razavi, Saman
  • Samadi, Vidya
  • Snow, Val
  • Vervoort, Willem
  • Voinov, Alexey
  • Wang, Dali
  • Wu, Wenyan
  • Zhang, Fengyuan
  • Zhang, Ke

The iEMSs Board  are in charge for 2 years, new elections will be held in 2024, prior to the Biennial Meeting.

Featured

iEMSs 2022 Awards presented

July 12, 2022

The iEMSs Board has confirmed the 2022 awards proposed by the Awards Committee and we used the opportunity of the iEMSs Biennial Conference in Brussels to announce and celebrate outstanding contributions to the Society in the following categories:

Biennial Medals

  • Tatjana Filatova
  • Marcus Janssen
  • Giorgio Mannina

Fellowships

  • Ann van Griensven
  • Serena Hamilton
  • Peter Khaiter
  • Jiri Nossent
  • Willem Vervoort

Early Career Research Excellence Prizes (ECREs)

  • Takuya Iwanaga
  • Firouzeh Taghikhah
  • Wenyan Wu