Videos and presentation materials from other INI events are also available.
Event | When | Speaker | Title | Presentation Material |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 09:00 to 09:30 |
Paula Harrison, Peter Cox |
Introduction to the Workshop and Programme
Workshop
aims: - Review the state-of-the-art in modelling land systems; - Identify key knowledge gaps where collaboration between different environmental, mathematical and social science disciplines may lead to new insights, methods and tools. |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 09:30 to 10:00 |
Bill Kunin |
Scaling populations and communities
Spatial population and
community patterns are bedevilled by issues of spatial (and temporal)
scaling. While it is sometimes
convenient to consider local (alpha) and landscape (gamma) scales of abundance
or diversity separately, we need to develop approaches that can consider ranges
of scales as a continuum. This talk will
focus on the scaling properties of population and community patterns, and on tools
to translate information across scales. These may lead to new approaches to
measuring, modelling and managing spatial ecological systems.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 10:00 to 10:30 |
Justin Sheffield | Scaling Challenges in Hydrology and Applications to Water Resources and Food Security |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 11:00 to 11:30 |
Panel discussion on “Spatial/temporal scaling in landscape modelling” |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 11:30 to 11:50 |
Henry Wynn |
Smart Landscapes
The EU Smart Cities programme and sub programmes such as
those on district heating and cooling (DHC), together with technological
innovations such as electric cars and pollution free zones present a vision of the modern city which may or may
not be realised. But there are many lessons for similar visions of landscapes.
In some sense the technology is the easy part. The real challenge, for
modelling, is to integrate the technological, economic, social and
environmental. There are matters of ownership, the development of new business
models, public-private funding and scale
(national/regional/local). Contracts play a key part and we will advocate, as
with cities, model-based contract design, to cope with the tensions between
long-term and short-term investment and between CAPEX and OPEX. Some exemplar
issues will be mentioned: the economic and social aspects of flooding, the use
of wetlands for carbon capture and the citizen as energy prosumer.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 11:50 to 12:10 |
Gavin Stewart |
Decision making in the face of uncertainty: improving the evidence base to support landscape decisions
This
talk will discuss the need to adopt a decision-theoretic approach to handling
uncertainty both to support policy and drive future needs-led research agendas.
I argue that the operational steps required to handle uncertainty are generally
known, but rarely combined judiciously. This has deleterious
ramifications because uncertainties are not coherently considered in
decision-making and are often downplayed in expert led science-policy
interactions.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 12:10 to 12:30 |
Martine Barons |
Decision-making under uncertainty: Using subjective probabilistic judgements for decision support in pollinator abundance and food security
Hunger and food poverty is on the increase even in developed nations like the UK, USA, Canada & Australia. With a growing population and a finite planet, there is urgent need for action, but in such a large, complex system identifying the most effective action requires decision support. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. In order to provide decision support, it is necessary to elicit probability distributions to evaluate subjective expected utility scores associated with ameliorating policies that might be enacted. When the underlying process model is extremely large and complex, this brings its own peculiar challenges. It is first necessary to elicit the overall, agreed structure describing in broad terms the underlying nature of the system from representatives of all domain experts across the system as a whole. We have now shown that this can be done formally and consistently with probability models if the elicitations concern the elicitation of dependences – formally termed irrelevances (Smith, Barons and Leonelli (2016)). Within a probability model, these irrelevance statements then transform into assertions about various conditional independence statements. These, in turn, can be used to determine how the system can be divided up into (conditionally) independent segments. The quantitative expert judgements associated with each segment of the process can then be delegated to a relevant panel of experts. The implicit (albeit virtual) owner of beliefs expressed in the system will be referred to as the supraBayesian , meaning that the decision-making group acts as a single person would and it is her coherence that we are concerned with. Under suitable conditions it can then be shown that the elicited overarching structure can compose these judgments together to form a coherent probabilistic model to score different options available to the user, termed an integrating decisions support system (IDSS). One element of the overarching food poverty models is food supply, and key to parts of this is an abundant and healthy population of pollinating insects to pollination services for food. In 2014 the UK government undertook a consultation and produced their pollinator strategy for the next 10 years “to see pollinators thrive, providing essential pollination services and benefits for food production, the wider environment and everyone.” However, the evidence base on the complex system driving pollinator vigour and numbers is patchy and held in disparate domains of expertise, making the evaluation of policy options problematic. In this talk I will describe how we are in the process of developing an IDSS based on these theoretical developments, and how a probabilistic model for pollinator abundance incorporating structured expert elicitation will then form a sub-module of this IDSS for policies relating to household food insecurity. J. Q. Smith, M.J. Barons, and M. Leonelli. Coherent inference for integrating decision support systems. arXiv, 2016. http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07394. Co-authors: Jim Q. Smith, Manuele Leonelli |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 14:00 to 14:30 |
Panel discussion on “Decision-making in the face of uncertainty” |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 14:30 to 15:00 |
Calum Brown |
The need (and opportunity) for improved modelling of land use decision-making
Computational modelling is a key tool in efforts to understand the dynamics of socio-ecological systems. Many models, however, tightly constrain those dynamics by making assumptions about economic equilibrium and optimisation in social systems, and mean-field or trend-based behaviour in ecological systems. Recent research has revealed that, contrary to these assumptions, small-scale behavioural processes shape the dynamics and interactions in socio-ecological systems across scales. Concurrently, data resources and computational tools have advanced to the point that simulation of these processes is increasingly feasible. I will present some recent advances, opportunities and challenges for simulating the role of human behaviour in land use change, building on conceptual and computational examples from both ecology and social science.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 15:00 to 15:30 |
Adam Kleczkowski |
Weakest-link control of invasive species: Impacts of memory, bounded rationality and network structure in repeated cooperative games
The nature of dispersal of
many invasive pests and pathogens in agricultural and forestry makes it
necessary to consider how the actions of one manager affect neighbouring
properties. In addition to the direct effects of a potential spread of a pest
and the resulting economic loss, there are also indirect consequences that
affect whole regions and that require coordinated actions to manage and/or to
eradicate it (like movement restrictions). In this talk we address the
emergence and stability of cooperation among agents who respond to a threat of
an invasive pest or disease. The model, based on the weakest-link paradigm,
uses repeated multi-participant coordination games where players’ pay-offs
depend on management decisions to prevent the invasion on their own land as
well as of their neighbours on a network. We show that for the basic
cooperation game agents select the risk-dominant strategy of a Stag hunt game
over the pay-off dominant strategy of implementing control measures. However,
cooperation can be achieved by the social planner offering a biosecurity
payment. The critical level of this payment depends on the details of the
decision-making process, with higher trust (based on reputation of other agents
reflecting their past performance) allowing significant reduction in necessary
payments and slowing down decay in cooperation when the payment is low. We also
find that allowing for uncertainty in decision-making process can enhance
cooperation for low levels of payments. Finally, we show the importance of
industry structure to the emergence of cooperation, with increase in the
average coordination number of network nodes leading to increase in the
critical biosecurity payment.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 16:00 to 16:30 |
Panel discussion on “Modelling social/human processes in landscapes” |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 16:30 to 16:50 |
Ian Holman |
Model(er) coupling in integrated modelling platforms
There is increasing recognition that simulating the complexity of human-environmental landscapes and associated decision making requires the integration of models or numerical representation of the processes influencing competition for, or access to, space, water etc and their interactions, inter-dependencies and feedbacks. Coupling of pre-existing models is one approach to providing this integration. This presentation will discuss the practical approaches taken to facilitate model coupling in the UK/European scale CLIMSAVE and IMPRESSIONS integrated modelling platforms, and how uncertainty and error propagation were evaluated. It will also consider the importance of modellers as sources of uncertainty within the projections from such coupled modelling systems. |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 16:50 to 17:10 |
Mark Rounsevell |
Model coupling in land system science
The land system is a complex system. It depends on a miriad of interactions between individual, heterogenous land users, on the variability of the physical environment (soils, climate, …) and on the diversity of societal structures including communities, institutions and public policy organisations. Many modelling approaches have been proposed to represent land systems, with the dominant paradigm based on economic optimisation. However, assuming that individual land managers make decisions about land use based on economic rational alone is a serious simplication of the complex land system. In practice, we know that individuals make land use decisions based on many, often conflicting factors such as risk aversion, social standing, tradition and environmental impact within the context of having imperfect access to knowledge. And that many of these processes play out at different spatial scale levels. In this presentation I will explore how different approaches to modelling land systems can be coupled across scales in order to capture the salient processes at each scale level. This includes modelling of land-based commodity trade-flows at the global scale, sub-national agent-based modelling of land use decision making, and the representation of public policy organisations that influence land users locally.
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 17:10 to 17:30 |
Gordon Blair |
Middleware to Support Model Coupling in Landscape Decision Making
Middleware is a term that refers to a layer of software that sits on top of an underlying computational infrastructure, providing a programming model to support the development of applications and services, and hiding the complexity of the underlying (inevitably distributed) infrastructure. This has been an area of intense activity both in academia and industry and a number of solutions and associated platforms have been proposed. Middleware has significant advantages in terms of interoperability and reduction in development time through re-use. This talk will pose the question of the role of middleware in supporting integrated environmental modelling, with a particular focus on supporting model coupling. The talk will highlight a significant gap between the functionality of existing middleware standards and platforms and the needs of the environmental sciences community, including in the important and demanding area of landscape decision-making. This is partially down to the focus of middleware on representing the end system behaviour, e.g. in service-oriented architecture, when in fact much of the complexity is in the interconnection or coupling between services. A further key reason is the domain specific requirements of modelling in terms of, for example: i) the need to understand the semantics of environmental concepts; ii) the subsequent need to manage mappings between the outputs of one model and the inputs of another, e.g. using arbitrary transfer functions; iii) the need to support reasoning across scales; iv) the important requirement to understand uncertainty in model chains including the propagation of uncertainty; v) the need to offer potentially sophisticated management of the underlying network/distributed system to deliver the right quality of service in terms of data transfer when dealing with potentially very large data sets. This talk will argue that there is an urgent need for middleware to support integrated environmental modelling, with specific focus on supporting model coupling. Furthermore, the talk will argue that this requires a fundamental rethink of middleware in terms of supporting the domain specific needs of environmental science [1]. [1] Blair, G.S. (2018). Complex distributed systems: The need for fresh perspectives. 38th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 1410-1421, 10.1109/ICDCS.2018.00142 |
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EBDW01 |
4th July 2019 17:30 to 18:00 |
Panel discussion on “Model coupling” |
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 09:00 to 09:30 |
Recap on the previous day | ||
EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 09:30 to 10:00 |
John Dearing |
Revealing the complex dynamics of real landscape systems
This talk examines landscape change from the perspective of complex social-ecological systems evolving through time. Such a perspective can reveal ‘hidden’ complex behaviour that may interact unpredictably with decision-making. These include feedback loops, system instabilities, critical transitions and trade-offs. Knowing the complex behaviours, such as feedback loops, within a system can help decision-makers avoid tipping points and traps in order to keep within ecologically sustainable and socially acceptable limits. There are two parts to the talk. a) Multiple time-series. Here, research analyses multiple time-series of social, economic, ecological, and climate variables covering the past few decades to help elucidate important changes in system interactions. In eastern China, studies at several sites show long term economic growth since 1950 as a trade-off with environmental deterioration, especially water quality. In western China, detailed studies of the lake Erhai lake-catchment system reveal the interactions between agriculture, climate and water management that led to a critical transition in the aquatic ecosystem in 2001. In the UK, a similar approach shows rapid agricultural intensification driving significant environmental degradation in England in the early 1980s, but with a recovery in most ecosystem services after 2000. However, the lack of recovery in farmland biodiversity and the ‘offshoring’ of some impacts represent major negative trade-offs. b) Systems modelling. Here, a case-study describes a systems model designed to guide decision-makers in the setting of ‘safe and just operating spaces’ for sustainable management. Monte Carlo simulations of fish catch from India's Chilika lagoon over the next 40 years are compared to conditions that are ecologically and socio-economically desirable. Akin to a satellite-navigation system, the model identifies multidimensional pathways giving at least a 75% chance of achieving the desirable future.
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 10:00 to 10:30 |
Peter Ashwin | Nonlinearities, tipping points and regime shifts |
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 10:30 to 11:00 |
Panel discussion on “Non-linearities” |
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 11:30 to 11:50 |
Daniel Williamson |
Scalable Uncertainty Quantification for calibrating spatio-temporal models
I'll present work on emulating and calibrating the spatial fields output by climate models in the hope that participants who run or develop land models see natural crossovers and uses for our technology in quantifying uncertainty to support decision makers.
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 11:50 to 12:10 |
Chris Dent |
Recent scoping studies in evidence based decision making against complex backgrounds
This talk will discuss research needs in evidence based decision making, based on scoping studies for the Centre for Digital Built Britain and the Supergen Hubnet project, the current Alan Turing Institute "Managing Uncertainty in Government Modelling" and "Use of Multiple Models Within and Organisation" project, and the presenter's own experience. This will be synthesised into suggestions of key topics for discussion during the subsequent four weeks of the Programme.
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 12:10 to 12:30 |
Ben Marchant |
Issues of scale and uncertainty in landscape scale data products
Policy-makers often exploit gridded data products
when making land-use decisions. These products provide information about the
spatial variation of many factors associated with geology, natural resources,
soil health, climate, topography and the potential occurrence of natural
hazards. These products might be integrated within mathematical, statistical or
machine learning models to answer specific questions regarding the need to
protect the land because of its value for productive agriculture or mineral
exploitation, the potential hazards associated with developing the land and the
suitability of sites for particular types of infrastructure. The British
Geological Survey produces many two- and three-dimensional data products (see
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/data/mapViewers/home.html). We also integrate these
products in decision support tools addressing many land-use questions such as
the suitability of land for sustainable drainage schemes, the need for
remediation of brownfield sites, the suitability of land for renewable energy
production and queries regarding the cost and environmental impacts of major
infrastructure projects. I will describe examples of such decision support
tools particularly focusing on the issues of uncertainty in the products used
to create them, the propagation of this uncertainty upon integration of these
products and the potential for a mismatch of scales between the different
products and the policy question being addressed. I will discuss strategies to
address these issues and the information and metadata that must be provided
with data products to facilitate such strategies.
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 12:30 to 13:00 |
Panel discussion on “Benchmarking, calibration and uncertainty" |
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EBDW01 |
5th July 2019 14:00 to 15:30 |
Closing Panel Discussion (tbc) | ||
EBD |
9th July 2019 10:00 to 12:00 |
Stephen Cornell | Ecological Insights from Mathematica and Individual Based Models |
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EBD |
11th July 2019 10:00 to 12:00 |
Victoria Volodina | Gaussian process Emulation and History Matching |
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EBD |
12th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Michael Goldstein | Model Discrepancy |
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EBD |
12th July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Michael Goldstein | Model Discrepancy - Part 2 |
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EBD |
15th July 2019 10:00 to 13:00 |
Oluwole Oyebamiji | Uncertainty quantification in high-dimensional landscape problems using Bayesian hierarchical models |
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EBD |
16th July 2019 09:00 to 10:00 |
Louise Kimpton | Correlated Bernoulli Processes via de Bruijn Graphs |
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EBD |
16th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Evan Baker | Predicting the Output from a Stochastic Model when a deterministic Approximation is Available |
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EBD |
16th July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Peter Alexander | Examples of Global Food System Analysis and |
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EBD |
17th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Brett Day | Peter Alexander |
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EBD |
17th July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Daniel Williamson | The Best of Both Worlds |
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EBD |
18th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Brett Day | Social Cost Benefit Analysis - it’s better than you think … probably |
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EBD |
18th July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Laura Graham | The Scale Problem |
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EBD |
19th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Marcel Van Oijen | Probabilistic Risk Analysis for vegetation |
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EBD |
19th July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Food Sustainability: Data and Conceptual Challenges in Indicator Development |
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EBD |
22nd July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Jenny Hodgson | Networks for Species to Survive Climate Change |
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EBD |
23rd July 2019 11:00 to 12:00 |
Qingying Shu | 'An indicator for resilience and security of water-energy-food (WEF) systems in industrialised nations’ |
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EBD |
24th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Elaine Spiller | Forecasting volcanic hazards with uncertainty: is it over? is it safe? |
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EBD |
25th July 2019 10:00 to 10:15 |
Andrew Mead |
FragStats
A brief description of the Fragstats package for measuring landscape structure
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EBD |
25th July 2019 10:15 to 11:15 |
James Bullock | Agland |
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EBD |
25th July 2019 11:30 to 12:00 |
Chris Dent | Working with Government’ |
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EBD |
25th July 2019 12:00 to 12:15 |
Andrew Mead | Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems |
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EBD |
26th July 2019 10:00 to 11:00 |
Felix Eigenbrod | Non-Stationary predictors for land use change into the future | |
EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 09:20 to 09:30 |
Welcome from David Abrahams (Isaac Newton Institute) | ||
EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 09:30 to 10:00 |
Paula Harrison | Introduction to the Workshop and Programme |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 10:00 to 10:30 |
Jenny Hodgson |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 10:30 to 11:00 |
Guy Ziv |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 11:30 to 12:00 |
Panel discussion on “Decision-making in the face of uncertainty” | ||
EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 12:00 to 12:30 |
Laura Graham |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 12:30 to 13:00 |
Alexis Comber |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 14:30 to 15:00 |
Panel discussion on “Spatial/temporal scaling” | ||
EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 15:00 to 15:30 |
James Bullock |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 15:30 to 16:00 |
Marcel Van Oijen |
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EBDW02 |
31st July 2019 16:30 to 17:00 |
Panel discussion on “Modelling processes in landscapes” | ||
EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 09:30 to 10:00 |
Anna Harper |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 10:00 to 10:30 |
Chris Huntingford |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 10:30 to 11:00 |
Panel discussion on “Model coupling” |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 11:30 to 12:00 |
Roderick Dewar |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 12:00 to 12:30 |
Richard Sibly |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 12:30 to 13:00 |
Panel discussion on “Benchmarking, calibration and uncertainty (including model emulation)” |
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EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 14:30 to 15:30 |
Breakout groups around research innovation and need clusters identified during panel discussions | ||
EBDW02 |
1st August 2019 16:00 to 18:00 |
Reporting back from breakout groups and synthesis of innovations and needs |
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EBDW03 |
7th September 2020 13:30 to 13:40 |
Welcome and Introduction from David Abrahams (INI Director) and Jane Leeks (Newton Gateway to Mathematics) | ||
EBDW03 |
7th September 2020 13:40 to 14:00 |
Peter Challenor |
Decision Making under Uncertainty
The next few years will be crucial for the future of the
UK landscape. There are important decisions that need to be made about
agricultural policy, nature conservation and how we respond to a changing
climate. All these decisions will involve large amounts of uncertainty. How can
we produce decision support tools that will help in the process? In this talk I
will investigate some fo the methods currently used to aid decision makers by
combining data and models and point out their advantages and disadvantages. I
will also look at some other new directions that could solve some of these
problems.
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EBDW03 |
7th September 2020 14:00 to 14:20 |
Felix Eigenbrod | Spatial/temporal scaling |
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EBDW03 |
7th September 2020 14:20 to 14:40 |
Paula Harrison |
Coupling models to represent interactions within landscape systems
This talk will summarise discussions from the Work
Programme on ‘Mathematical and Statistical Challenges in Landscape Decision
Making’, which took place between 3 July to 2 August 2019, focusing on coupling
models to represent interactions within landscape systems. Many studies of
landscape decisions are based on models of individual sectors, such as
agriculture, forestry and water use, without considering interactions between
these sectors. Yet, many drivers (be they climate change, policies or
other) may lead to altered interactions between sectors
and scales. Coupling models across sectors and scales enables interactions,
trade-offs and synergies between different components of landscape systems to
be captured in a systemic manner. This is important because modelling
assessments that do not account for cross-sectoral or cross-scale interactions
have the potential to misrepresent impacts and thus, the need or otherwise for
adaptive action through landscape decision-making. Hence, this topic was
discussed in detail during the 2019 INI Programme. Research priorities were
divided into four
themes: (i) transparency, reproducibility and
communication in coupled models; (ii) model coupling toolbox; (iii) model
coupling technicalities; and
(iv) taking advantage of the benefits of model coupling.
The key insights that emerged in these four themes were captured within short,
medium and longer term research roadmaps.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 09:30 to 11:00 |
Session 2: Stakeholder Perspectives - CHAIR Paula Harrison | ||
EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 09:30 to 09:55 |
James Skates | Stakeholder talk |
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 09:55 to 10:20 |
Pam Berry, Daniel McGonigle | Stakeholder talk |
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 10:20 to 10:45 |
Sue Pritchard |
In the big debates about land use, whose voices count?
The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) has
already engaged in innovative new approaches to engage citizens around the UK
in the big questions about countryside, environment, climate, nature and land use.
Yet it remains difficult to get diverse perspectives into research and debate.
Learning from FFCC’s experiences, Sue will use her talk to explore different
strategies for democratic decision making around land use in the UK.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 10:45 to 11:00 |
Heiko Balzter |
'Building back better landscapes' - UK landscape decision making after Covid-19
The Landscape Decisions Programme aims to integrate
social, ecological and mathematical sciences into landscape decision
frameworks. It was initiated before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted everybody’s
lives. But how has
Covid-19 changed the demand structure on UK landscapes
and how we ought to adapt our decision making? This talk seeks to illuminate
some of the issues emerging from the current discussion how to ‘Build Back
Better’.
Fundamental questions include the environmental impacts
of the restrictions on movement and social distancing on landscapes,
environmentally friendly pathways to economic recovery, the role of landscapes
in achieving net zero carbon, air pollution in cities, disease transmission
from wild animals to humans, the value of local recreational uses of landscapes
to public health, social and economic inequalities, access to the countryside,
changing cultural perceptions of landscapes and issues of equality and
diversity.
In this context it is important to understand the
political, cultural and land ownership contexts in which landscape decisions in
the UK are taken. A tension may arise when some ecosystem services such as air
quality or flood retention benefit the wider population, but others benefit
mainly the landowner or tenant.
In this talk, I will reflect on how the Landscape
Decisions Programme may be able to make a contribution to ‘building back better
landscapes’ as we come out of the lockdown into a post-Covid world, and the
contributions that social, ecological and mathematical sciences can make.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 13:30 to 13:50 |
Mark Brewer |
Drought risk analysis for forested landscapes: Project PRAFOR
This project aims to extend theory for probabilistic risk
analysis of continuous systems, test its use against forest data, use process
models to predict future risks, and develop decision-support tools.
Risk is commonly defined as the expectation value for
loss. Most risk theory is developed for discrete hazards such as accidents,
disasters and other forms of sudden system failure and not for systems where
the hazard variable is always present and continuously varying, with matching
continuous system response.
Risks from such continuous hazards (levels of water,
pollutants) are not associated with sudden discrete events, but with extended
periods of time during which the hazard variable exceeds a threshold. To manage
such risks, we need to know whether we should aim to reduce the probability of
hazard threshold exceedance or the vulnerability of the system.
In earlier work, we showed that there is only one
possible definition of vulnerability that allows formal decomposition of risk
as the product of hazard probability and system vulnerability. We have used
this approach to analyse risks from summer droughts to the productivity of
vegetation across Europe under current and future climatic conditions; this
showed that climate change will likely lead to greatest drought risks in
southern Europe, primarily because of increased hazard probability rather than
significant changes in vulnerability.
We plan to improve on this earlier work by: adding
exposure to hazard; quantifying uncertainties in our risk estimates for risk;
relaxing assumptions via Bayesian hierarchical modelling; testing our approach
on both observational data from forests in the U.K., Spain and Finland and on
simulated data from process-based modelling of forest response to climate
change; embedding the approach in Bayesian decision theory; and developing an
interactive web application as a tool for preliminary exploration of risk and
its components to support decision-making.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 13:50 to 14:10 |
Richard Everitt |
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and particle MCMC for calibrating computer models
This presentation will describe work conducted under two projects in the
Landscape Decisions programme. We will outline the role we believe ABC and
particle MCMC can play in calibrating landscape models, describe the current
state of software being developed to allow other researchers to easily use
these methods, and introduce a new technique called "rare event
ABC-SMC^2" for using ABC with high-dimensional data.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 14:10 to 14:30 |
David Large |
Developing a statistical methodology for the assessment and management of peatlands
In good condition, peatlands are the most efficient
carbon store of all soils. The UK has 2
Mha of peatlands (10% land area). 80% of these peatlands are damaged to some degree
and estimated to emit 10 Mt C a-1, a similar magnitude to oil refineries or
landfill sites. Restoring degraded
peatlands to halt carbon losses is an essential part of a global strategy to
fight climate change. In the UK, £100s millions of public money have been
pledged to restore peatland, yet we do not have a reliable and cost-effective
way to direct and evaluate investment in restoration over large and often
remote areas.
In a previous research project, we showed that peatland
condition can be found from satellite data that measures surface motion of the
peat. However, our satellite-based approach produces too much complex data that
cannot be reliably and consistently analysed by eye.
To address this, we will develop a new statistical method
that can robustly and consistently quantify the changes in the peatland
landscape from the satellite data. This requires methods capable of handling
extremely large and complex structured datasets. In statistics, a new
framework, known as Object-Oriented Data Analysis (OODA), is ideally suited to
achieve this purpose by building models based on suitable choices of data
objects. OODA can be used for developing parsimonious models for detecting
change, and for quantifying uncertainty in predictions. OODA of the satellite
data as functions of space and time will enable the modelling of trends and
variability in the different regions, and the detection of change in the
peatland.
The result will be a series of maps that illustrate the
change in peatland landscape over time that are designed to be used by land
managers and policy makers to guide decision making, help reduce unnecessary
spending and evaluate investment.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 14:30 to 14:50 |
Eleni Matechou |
Integrating new statistical frameworks into eDNA survey and analysis at the landscape scale
DNA-based surveys are increasingly being employed for
monitoring wildlife species, while at the same time, new statistical methods
are being developed for modelling species records. In this talk I will describe
the rationale and idea behind our project, which aims to realise the huge
potential contribution of DNA-based data to decision-making at the landscape
level.
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EBDW03 |
8th September 2020 16:00 to 17:30 |
Workshop Quiz | ||
EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 09:30 to 10:30 |
Session 5: State-of-the-art Environmental modelling - CHAIR Paula Harrison | ||
EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 09:30 to 10:00 |
Mark Rounsevell |
An overview of land system modelling
Land system modelling is primarily focused on the
question:
how do land managers make decisions about the use of land
resources. There is a long history of land system modelling stretching back to
classical economists in the early 19th Century. Early concepts focused strongly
on economic (land rent) models to explain land use distributions, but these
began to also include the notion of relative location (e.g. distance to
markets) in determining land use patterns. Much of the
initial thinking from this time is still relevant today and shapes, to some
extent, current thinking about how to model the decision-making processes of
land users.
However, as land use models evolved through time,
non-economic aspects began to take on increasing importance. Processes such as
access to information and the spatial diffusion of knowledge through space and
time were shown to be critical in understanding landscape decisions. This has
led to an evolution in land system modelling towards a focus on agency and
social interaction in addition to economic aspects. Methods such as Agent-Based
Modelling (ABM) are now able to accommodate a range of human behaviours that
underpin decision making and the social interaction processes that foster
knowledge exchange through cooperation or competition. In this talk I provide
an overview of the evolution of land system modelling exploring the advantages
and disadvantages of the many extant approaches. I also explore the considerable
progress that is still needed to develop land system models further, e.g.
better representing human decision-making processes, better testing against
data, coupling land system models with other components of the broader
environment, and endogenizing the policy making process within models.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 10:00 to 10:30 |
Brett Day |
Simulation of UK land-use policy using integrated environment-economy models
By and large, exploration of land use change using
integrated environment-economy models has tended to focus on the analysis of
scenarios or on the exploration of locations where land use change might
deliver desired outcomes. Of course, determining where best to change land use
and actually achieving that change using the policy levers open to
decision-makers are two different things. In this talk we present methods and
results from a series of on-going projects, that use integrated
environment-economy models to examine the question of 'best' policy design.
Methodologically the key innovations of the research
revolve around the application of mathematical programming to identify 'best'
policies, the use of agent-based modelling to examine outcomes for policies
that place land owners in situations of strategic interaction and the
application of methods of robust optimisation to examine decision-making under
uncertainty. Our applications focus on land use change, particularly those
relating to the deintensification of agriculture for multiple environmental
gains and the expansion of biocrops and forest to achieve carbon reduction
targets.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 11:00 to 12:00 |
Session 4a: State-of-the-art in quantitative social modelling - CHAIR Viktoria Spaiser | ||
EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 11:00 to 11:30 |
Gary Polhill |
Social simulation modelling within landscape systems
Agent-based social simulation entails the explicit, individual representation of various actors within the landscape, and the ways they affect each other. It offers a natural and powerful way to model human social systems and integrate with spatially-explicit biophysical and ecological models. In this talk, I will present an example from my own work with Alessandro Gimona and Nick Gotts (The James Hutton Institute) and Andrew Jarvis (Lancaster Environment Centre) on simulating the incentivization of biodiversity in agriculture. The talk will briefly cover some of the risks associated with coupling models to simulate landscape systems, emphasizing the importance of semantic interoperability.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 11:30 to 12:00 |
Marc Keuschnigg |
Analytical Sociology and Computational Social Science
Analytical
sociology focuses on social interactions among individuals and the
hard-to-predict aggregate outcomes they bring about. It seeks to identify
generalizable mechanisms giving rise to emergent properties of social systems
which, in turn, feed back on individual decision-making. This research program
benefits from computational tools such as agent-based simulations, natural
language processing, and large-scale web experiments, and has considerable
overlap with the nascent field of computational social science. By providing
relevant analytical tools to rigorously address sociology’s core questions,
computational social science has the potential to considerably advance
sociology. The disciplinary relationship, however, is not a one-way street, and
this talk outlines how analytical sociology, with its theory-grounded approach
to computational social science, can help to move the field forward from mere
descriptions and predictions to the explanation of social phenomena.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 13:30 to 16:00 |
Session 4b: State-of-the-art in quantitative social modelling - CHAIR Felix Eigenbrod | ||
EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 13:30 to 14:00 |
Alexis Comber |
Key Considerations for integrating Quantitative Social Science within Landscape Decisions
The land resource is used to satisfy many different land
-related objectives:
food production and security, biodiversity, housing and
other developments, leisure and recreation, as well as flood protection,
biomass, energy production and waste. Landscape Decisions are fundamentally
concerned determining what to put where and have to balance competing demands
for these different Ecosystem Services. This allocation problem is further
complicated by a number of specifically social factors:
- Different actors in landscape decision making (from
policy to landowners to citizen ‘consumers’) have different objectives and
priorities and value landscape elements in different ways
- These values vary between and within groups, as well as
with socio-economic context
- Individual and institutional objectives also operate
over different time frames and spatial scales Thus some form of socio-economic
analysis or social modelling is integral to landscape decisions to
- incorporate stakeholder preferences (e.g. the relative
value of any given
ESs)
- model land management behaviours (e.g. risk seekers,
consolidators, market reactors, etc)
- evaluate the socio-economic impacts of landscape
decisions (e.g. to quantify the trade-offs between food production and flood
risk mitigation) This talk will outline and illustrate the impacts of a number
of key but frequently overlooked issues associated with incorporating *any spatial
data* (including data describing social processes) into landscape decision
models, related to scale, scales of decision making and model evaluation.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 14:00 to 14:30 |
Suzy Moat |
Quantifying beautiful places and their link to health and happiness
Are beautiful environments good for our health and
happiness? In this talk, I will describe how millions of ratings from an online
game called ‘Scenic-or-Not’ and a mobile app called ‘Mappiness’ have begun to
offer new answers to this age-old question. I will explain how deep learning
can help us understand whether beautiful places are simply natural places - or
whether humans might be able to build beautiful places too.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 15:00 to 15:30 |
Milena Tsvetkova |
Studying complex social systems with online games
Controlled experiments with human subjects provide causal answers to
questions that are otherwise difficult to address with observational methods.
Specifically, laboratory experiments have been crucial for improving our
understanding of individual behavior. Nowadays, online experiments allow us to
scale up and also study collective behavior, group-level phenomena, and
complex-system dynamics such as positive feedback loops, tipping points, path
dependency, and self-organization. To demonstrate the potential of this method,
I will present a project that uses an online game to study how differently
endowed individuals who interact with each other can produce fair outcomes. We
juxtapose fairness mechanisms that individuals employ – generosity,
reciprocity, and inequity aversion – with competing concepts of societal
fairness – meritocracy, equality of opportunity, equality of outcomes, and
Rawls’ theory of justice. The work illuminates which interventions will work
better for a specific desired outcome in a company, organization, school, or
community. The game and method can be adapted to study topics as diverse as
urban segregation, rural development, and immigrant integration.
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EBDW03 |
9th September 2020 15:30 to 16:00 |
Jakub Bijak |
The tale of the three landscapes: Connecting the layers through modelling
Landscape can be
conceptualised through a range of interacting layers, corresponding to
different aspects and features that vary across space. In this talk, we focus
on three such layers: physical, human and information. By using an example of
an agent-based model of migration route formation, we show how the interactions
between these three layers can be modelled and analysed. We also demonstrate
how the tools of uncertainty quantification can shed light on the properties
and behaviour of the models and systems they represent. We conclude by
reflecting on the perspectives of model-based approaches for connecting the
various layers of the landscape in a coherent way, drawing from the experience
of different disciplines of science |
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EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 09:30 to 15:15 |
Session 6: Integrating social, mathematical and enviro-ecological modelling - Group Discussions | ||
EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 09:30 to 09:45 |
Paula Harrison, Felix Eigenbrod | Introduction | |
EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 09:45 to 12:00 |
Formation of breakout groups & initial discussions
Breakout Room Topics: -The role of uncertainty in decision-making -The role of spatial-temporal dynamics in landscape decision-making -The role of complexities and non-linearities in landscape decision-making-The role of human processes in landscape decision-making -The role of social influence in landscape decision-making processes - Interdisciplinary integration across the social, mathematical and environmental sciences to improve the scientific evidence base supporting landscape decision-making. |
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EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 13:30 to 14:30 |
Reporting back from breakout groups on gaps and priorities for future research | ||
EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 14:30 to 14:45 |
Viktoria Spaiser | Summary of workshop aims | |
EBDW03 |
10th September 2020 14:45 to 15:15 |
Peter Challenor, Paula Harrison, Felix Eigenbrod, Viktoria Spaiser | Panel discussion – Key steps towards interdisciplinary integration across the social, mathematical and environmental sciences to improve the scientific evidence base supporting landscape decision-making. |