The 4th International Conference on Integrating GIS and Environmental
Modeling (GIS/EM4) will be convened September 2-8, 2000 at the Banff Centre
for Conferences at Banff, Alberta, Canada. The metabolism of the fourth
meeting will be similar to that of the previous three held at irregular
intervals in the last ten years (Boulder, Breckenridge, and Santa Fe). But
rather than simply continuing a conference series, each of these meetings
has been created as an individual enterprise. Each has responded to a
strong desire by participants to continue the work of the conference as a
collaborative event; as an independent consortium of individuals and
institutions; and as a means to learn about and define research
opportunities and needs in a cross-disciplinary forum.
The program for GIS/EM4 (too follow) will be similar to previous
conferences in that each day will begin with seminal keynote talks followed
by concurrent presentation sessions and it will feature demonstrations,
posters, and workshops spanning five days. But it will be different in many
ways. For instance: GIS/EM4 will lengthen the time available by one day; it
will target a broader set of topics, including human-environment
interactions, and it will be punctuated by "town meetings" that will allow
key issues to be distilled and carried forward through a concluding work
meeting to a report on research needs to be released after the conference.
Conference sessions are being designed to help gain a fresh perspective on
the evolution and state of theory and practice in integrating
spatio-temporal analyses and environmental modeling, and to assess research
needs for the future. A special conference theme is human-environment
interactions, and the role that GIS and modeling have in their improved
understanding and prediction. Sessions will be organized to focus on the
following cross-cutting elements in addition to already familiar
disciplinary approaches (hydrology, air pollution, land use, etc.) and
environmental media domains (air, water, biota, etc.).
Program categories and topics to be included at GIS/EM4:
Research prioritization, utilization, and evaluation
1. Research and development opportunities and constraints
2. Users, advocates, producers, and sponsors
3. Auditing and performance measures
Natural systems and system relations
4. Biotic (living) systems
5. Physical (non-living) systems
6. Managed (agricultural, silvicultural, urban...) systems
7. Human-environment interactions
Analytic frameworks, properties, and applications
8. Problem solving environments
9. Modeling techniques and tools
10. Statistical techniques and tools
11. Decision support/aide and decision making
12. Integration, coupling, and synergism
System dimensions, characteristics, and behaviors
13. Complexity and chaos
14. Spatial dimensions
15. Temporal dimensions
16. Uncertainty and predictability
17. Adaptivity, feedback, and dynamics
Language, metrics, monitoring, benchmarks, and interpretation
18. Representations and formalisms
19. Measurement (including data) and indicators
20. Information handling and knowledge bases
21. Visualization and explanation
This fourth conference will continue a cross-disciplinary, pan-scientific,
and problem solving emphasis consistent with concern for better integrated
understanding of complex whole systems, their integrity and sustained
functioning, and particularly (but not exclusively) their interactions with
human activity. Spatial, statistical, temporal, and other methodological
considerations are expected to be given balanced treatment with issues of
science theory, new data sources and sensors, computing technologies, and
application techniques.
You are invited to participate at GIS/EM4. To reserve accommodations and
register for the conference, please see our on-line form at the "Desk" page
of the conference web site
(http://www.colorado.edu/research/cires/banff/desk/). For questions, please
send messages to [log in to unmask]
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