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Conference Prospectus - GIS/EM4 |
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4th International Conference on Integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Environmental Modeling |
Table of contents
Summary 4|
Leadership
Decadal review Evolution of related research programs Data synthesis opportunities and problems Innovations in scope and content |
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Enabling cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration Defining research agendas Identifying developmental and entrepreneurial opportunities Providing leadership and innovation |
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Letter of intent and prospectus Announcements Graduate student involvement Invitations |
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Core Planning Group Administration and conference secretariat Approach Program Subject innovations |
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Approach Refereed Journal Publication Book Web site and compact disc (CD) |
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Advance development funding Endorsement and institutional support in kind Program contributions and nominations |
Experience has shown the need for leadership in molding the direction of research scholars and agendas to provide direction in better integrating hydrological, atmospheric, pollution, ecosystem, crop, land cover, aquatic, and other individual and coupled environmental models with GIS and allied technologies. Expressive of that leadership, the workshop will reformulate an agenda for long-term research in constituent subjects, their integration, and their informed use. This will be accomplished by assessing and building on the legacy of three prior successful workshops and related research programs, by directly involving a pan-scientific group of concerned scientists and graduate students in productive discourse through an innovative program, and by delivering meaningful outcomes in an agenda for future work.
Decadal review
Despite the success of preceding meetings and the many accomplishments they have stimulated in nearly ten years since their inception, there continues to be strong need for a unique scientific forum, building upon this decade of experience that is devoted to better integration of tools, techniques, and methods for modeling supported by GIS and related technologies, but not limited by disciplinary perspectives. Support is requested for program design and coordination, selection and involvement of key contributing scientists, participation of selected graduate student collaborators, and preparation of a web work-site, conference CD, and book.
Evolution of related research programs
Since 1991, when the initial workshop first enunciated an agenda for research in this area, important broad research programs have evolved and matured in areas such as global change, earth systems science, and ecosystems management. In nearly the same interval, relevant NSF centers have been started to deal with geographic information and analysis, ecological data synthesis, and environmental decision making. Likewise NASA’s system of distributed data centers has expanded to meet the challenge of placing remotely sensed data into service to better understand human dimensions of environmental change. Considerable progress has been made, but much more remains to be done, and still more to be discovered relative to synergisms and conflicts in environmental problem solving. Much of that work will need to be mediated using spatially explicit models and GIS.
Data synthesis opportunities and problems
By the time the proposed meeting is convened in the fall of 2000, new EOS remote sensing data streams will have become operational with a variety of others to follow. These sensors represent the largest class of data innovations in more than ten years and are expected to have a significant impact on many GIS-based modeling activities by virtue of their improved temporal and spatial resolution. While these new platforms promise to expand the range of capability of far-field measurement, long-standing problems remain in the integration of remote and in-situ measurements as well as contact measurement and socio-economic surveys, which are becoming increasingly outpaced by environmental problem solving requirements. Timing for this meeting is planned to respond to opportunities posed by new satellite data streams and to problems posed by traditional, but lagging, near-field data capabilities.
Innovations in scope and content
Innovation has been an organizing principle of prior meetings. Most urgent among several specific innovations, is elevating the importance of human dimensions and socio-economic considerations within frameworks established by the natural and physical sciences for global change and other environmental problem solving. Additional topical innovations will include more intensive treatment of temporal data and time-series analyses, inclusion of oceanic and biotic vector issues, and expanded coverage of land transformation modeling (an important "application bridge" between the natural and social sciences). Opportunity to successfully innovate has been achieved by establishing confidence in a workshop model that continues to help meet research needs while anticipating their evolution.
Recent meetings
Each of the three prior conferences was developed independently without expectation of subsequent meetings. After the first of these correctly anticipated need for such a forum and identified an agenda for research, two others were convened some years apart in response to persisting need expressed by scientists working at the interface of mathematical modeling, GIS and visualization, and data and statistical methods.
Success is attributed largely to innovation and leadership which looked beyond tools and technology to participant scientists and the means by which their work can be affected by using common tools and technologies to explore other disciplinary approaches to joint environmental problem solving.
The ultimate outcome of such conferences remains the improvement and informed use of predictive methods and techniques (process, simulation, stochastic, numerical, and other quantitative models) for environmental problem solving. As one means toward this end, GIS provides an important tool set and integrative technology. The unique contribution of these meetings has been recognizing and attacking, more holistically, matters of explicit spatio-temporal analytic methods, cross-disciplinary collaboration, technological integration with the interactions and synergisms possible among them.
The first conference of this sort was formulated by a team of research scientists then affiliated with the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Geological Survey; its founder and two original members continue involvement through this prospectus. That team established a consortium of leading scientists and a collaborative link with the, then, newly formed National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. This consortium funded and convened a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in 1991. Results exceeded expectations and the meeting accommodated nearly twice the anticipated number of participating scientists. The resulting book of invited and contributed papers formulated the first agenda for research in this area (Goodchild, et al., 1993).
A second meeting, three years later, at the request of many scientists who strongly endorsed the enterprise, and which included important innovations needed to sustain its leadership role, was convened in Breckenridge, Colorado in 1993. It was characterized by both greater depth and breadth with limited, but explicit, inclusion of human dimensions of environmental change (Goodchild, et al., 1996).
The third international conference was convened jointly with NCGIA by a consortium of scientists, scientific agencies, and technology partners who retained continuity under the leadership of a Core Planning Group of scientists. Held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1996, this meeting incorporated strong influence by the Santa Fe Institute in areas such as individual-based modeling and evolutionary computing. Special sessions on land use and anthropological modeling applications were also incorporated in the first explicit commitments to human dimensions within the domain of such a meeting.
Total attendance at the three conferences exceeded 1700. Impacts have included establishing "other-disciplinary" awareness and idea exchange, creation of persisting cross-disciplinary networks of cooperation, and triggering secondary meetings and follow-up symposia on issues such as hydrological modeling, revitalization of work in under-appreciated fields (land use modeling, stimulation of tool development and entrepreneurial partnerships with commercial entities like ESRI), and an echo of modeling emphases within GIS-related professional societies.
Papers from the first two meetings were published as edited books:
Environmental Modeling with GIS, edited by M.F. Goodchild, B.O. Parks, and L.T. Steyaert. New York: Oxford University Press (1993)
GIS and Environmental Modeling, edited by M.F. Goodchild, L.T. Steyaert, and B.O. Parks, et al.. Fort Collins: GIS World (1996).
For the third conference, the worldwide web was used to distribute information prior to the conference and to give broader access to the conference papers (http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu). Rather than an edited book, the proceedings were published as a CD (Goodchild, et al., 1996) to reduce production time between conference and publication.
Our aim is to provide both continuity with the past and a fresh perspective in meeting the needs and expectations of the community of scientific and technical persons who have come to respect and rely upon these conferences.
Significance to the advancement of knowledge or education
Enabling cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration
The conferences on integrating GIS and environmental modeling meet a unique need by creating cross-disciplinary exchange of information about environmental simulation modeling, geospatial data issues, remote sensing science, and GIS technologies. These interdisciplinary exchanges, which otherwise would not have existed, build a valuable multidisciplinary forum through which hydrologists, ecologists, geographers, meteorologists, biologists, soil scientists, and other natural science discipline representatives can effectively share ideas. However, they will now collaborate on modeling, spatial data, and GIS applications and innovations with specialists in human and societal dimensions of environmental change.
Defining research agendas
Based on past conference participant response, the educational benefit from this cross-disciplinary exchange of knowledge on interrelated modeling, data, and GIS issues is a powerful incentive for defining research agendas as well as helping to identify promising new scientific research opportunities such as multi-scale landscape characterization for land process research and data development for coupled-modeling in Earth System Science activities. It provides unique cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange on GIS and modeling issues that are not typically the focus of traditional conferences or professional society meetings.
Identifying developmental and entrepreneurial opportunities
The forum provides GIS tool developers in both academe and the private sector with a unique opportunity to confront a wide spectrum of research and applications modeling activities that demonstrate the potential utility and future requirements of GIS for data development, analysis, and decision support functions.
Providing leadership and innovation
While building on past accomplishments, the proposed conference will again take a leadership role by developing a research agenda for GIS, providing educational sessions in geographic information science as well as incorporating socio-economic modeling and human-dimension factors. The inclusion of human and societal dimensions of environmental change will foster needed interconnections between natural science and socio-economic modeling approaches, especially in a coupled-modeling mode involving GIS as a "bridging technology" for environmental assessment and decision support. Closely related to this are significant advancements in quantitative remote sensing promised by programs such as EOS Earth Science Enterprise (formerly Mission to Planet Earth), and the challenges and opportunities for land use change analysis that will need investigation using remote sensing, GIS, and modeling applications. And, although progress has been made in defining and developing advanced GIS tools and techniques, much work remains in the areas of temporal, hierarchical, and object-oriented GIS support to modeling functions.
Leadership, core organizing group, and affiliations
The Core Planning Group for the proposed conference will consist of both continuing and new member scientists. The success, leadership, and innovation of such meetings depend, in part, on the collegiality among these members and with the larger community of scientists. Tthe meeting will be designed and convened under the leadership of Dr. Bradley Parks in collaboration with Mr. Michael Crane and Dr. Keith Clarke. Following are current Core Planning Group members and their affiliations (others are to be named).
Members of the Core Planning Group of scientists who have designed and convened past meetings, listed by their affiliation at the time of involvement, include:
Location and dates
The proposed conference is scheduled for September 2-8, 2000, at The Banff Centre for Conferences in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Saturday will be a travel day for both arrivals and departures. This venue allows the meeting to become truly international by virtue of having Canada as the host country and the prospect of greater involvement by Canadians and others. Benefits of genuinely international operations can now be accomplished economically since travel to Canada and Mexico by (most) US government employees (and those who must conform to Federal guidelines), is no longer classified as foreign travel. Selection of this location on the continent assures a destination which is more central than the coasts, near an air travel hub, remote and attractive enough to motivate participants, and other international travelers may benefit from fewer visa restrictions.
Methods of announcement and invitation
Letter of intent
A letter of intent as well as this prospectus has been circulated among the Core Planning Group and key institutional sponsors to invite selective responses on issues of:
Announcements
Web announcements will be posted to targeted list and host servers. Mail announcements will be sent both to past registrants and to members of societies with which new alliances will be created for that purpose. Notices published in journals and print media will be ads, announcements, or letters to their editors from the Core Planning Group. In all cases meeting announcements will target natural, physical, and social scientists who have need or concern for improving spatio-temporal predictive modeling of processes, events, and phenomena for environmental problem solving.
Graduate student involvement
NSF funding has been provided to support direct participation by graduate students. Effort will be made to encourage students so that they might undertake research or studies that are relevant as entries to a competitive selection process sponsored by the Core Planning Group. Those students selected will participate in a cross-disciplinary collaborative exercise that will be integrated with the meeting program and outcomes. Announcements of this opportunity will target academic departments and programs.
Invitations
Invitations will be extended to prospective non-US and non-North American members to be added to the Core Planning Group. Keynote and invited speakers will be identified jointly by the Core Planning Group and invited by teams who will divide responsibility for final program development. Other authors and contributors, identified through a more tightly focused and rigorous solicitation, will be invited by program development teams. Participants will be invited in open announcements. Graduate student applicants will be screened by a jury established for this purpose. Acceptance will be based upon a submitted position paper, white paper, or development product. Winners of this competition will be invited by Core Planning Group members designated to coordinate graduate student contribution to the program.
Meeting organization
Core Planning Group
The meeting will rely on a Core Planning Group of new and continuing scientists to independently design and organize the event, representing a diversity of disciplines, institutional affiliations, regions, and research orientations. This fourth meeting will take a more actively international posture by expanding the Core Planning Group to include three members from Europe, Asia, and Australia. Strong international ties already exist and will be strengthened through Core Planning Group participation and alliance with scientific groups undertaking similar or related activity outside the US.
Administration and conference secretariat
The conference secretariat will be operated at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), with limited assistance from the University of California-Santa Barbara, National Center of Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). CU-CIRES will be responsible for conference design and development and UC-NCGIA will assist with operations and support, particularly in publishing tasks. This collaboration is expected to build on past efficiencies and to retain strengths in spatially-related analytic technologies while strengthening a systems approach to scientific problem-solving integrated with adaptive management and decision-making. A portion of administrative and logistical planning responsibilities will be met by contract with The Banff Centre for Conferences. Within this proposed framework, decisions about the nature, scope, style, and content of these meetings remains the responsibility of the Core Planning Group.
Approach
The success of three preceding conferences suggests that, to enable reformulating a new research agenda, a longer-term view needs to be adopted, the number of participants should be limited to approximately 500, and individual program breadth should be narrowed. Two streams of activity will pervade planning, and meeting structure. The first will be a conference track addressing progress achieved, creative opportunities, and acknowledged needs. The second, a panel and workshop track, will render a subset of individuals who will both carefully construct and react to the full conference venue, issues under discussion, and the perceptions of participants. A web work-site will be employed before and throughout the meeting to focus thinking, facilitate discussion, and help derive and formalize an agenda for future research. Results will comprise a reference quality book.
Program
The program will be designed to allow:
The conference program will span six and one half days and will follow a clear progression of activity. The main portion of the meeting will be structured to begin each day with two plenary presentations chosen for their insightful, innovative, and inspiring treatment of topics that will challenge the imaginations of those participating. The remainder of the daily program will be devoted to parallel presentation sessions, discussions, and working groups.
Teaching workshops on special topics/Review Panel Workshop #1 (planning for derivation of research agenda).
Integration and synthesis themes/Incorporation of human dimensions and temporal data as examples of additional emphases.
Broad treatment of applications by discipline and specialty topic/Inclusion of land use, oceanic, and biotic vector modeling as special topics examples.
Fundamental data suitability issues/New EOS data-stream opportunities and near field data challenges.
In-depth sessions by discipline or special topic.
Wrap-up for participants, Panel workshop #2 (formalizing and ratifying recommendations for research agenda) and ad-hoc meetings.
Although the proposed program will remain an intensive and demanding one, it will also incorporate more time for informal interaction and more structured opportunities for free discussion, brain-storming, and networking with colleagues.
Subject innovations
Dissemination of results
Approach
A combination of modern and traditional communication and publishing techniques will be employed in a mutually reinforcing manner. A web site will be constructed and maintained to support interaction among participants in the meeting as well as a broader audience. This site will be the focus for issue papers, application examples, and dialogue in a virtual meeting convened long before, but continuing through the actual conference. This will allow emphasis at the conference to be shifted to active discussion, argument, collaboration, and other agenda-setting activity and away from passive models wherein participants "read" their contributions to colleagues. The virtual pre-conference approach has been successfully tested, not only for the Santa Fe workshop, but for a USGS/NCGIA-sponsored follow up meeting on land use modeling (http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/landuse97). Evaluations by participants indicate that this was a critical and highly successful innovation for that meeting. We intend to conduct equivalent post-meeting evaluations for the Banff conference.
Refereed Journal Publication
The International Journal of Geographical Information Systems selected eight invited papers from the Breckenridge Conference and used them for a special issue, on the Integration of GIS and Environmental Modeling. Papers covered hydrology, rainfall prediction, soil mapping, space-time integration within GRASS, and decision support with GIS (Wilson, 1995). While no plans for a similar issue exist for 2000, a new journal Environmental Modeling and GIS was created as a result of discussions started at the Santa Fe meeting. This would be a logical place for another special issue.
Book
The book resulting from the conference and the compact disc which will accompany it are expected to build on experience gained with the first such meeting convened in Boulder, Colorado, in 1989 (Goodchild, et al., 1993). This volume provided the first reference quality book on the subject, and has been reprinted several times. Addressing status and trends as well as future requirements was a central purpose espoused in the volume, that continues to serve as an upper-level text for college courses in both modeling and GIS applications, and is sold in commercial book stores and cited frequently. A printed book that updates the Boulder volume will provide the following advantages:
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a systematic and coherent treatment of key subjects that frame an agenda for research·
extension and continuity with the important contribution made by the first printed volume·
technology-independent information dissemination methods available to all readers·
permanence and broad access afforded by print medium through libraries and vendors· a stable and cogent volume to which a CD containing supporting material in multi-media, interactive format can be added.
Web site and CD
Strong advantage is being taken of opportunities afforded by web-to-compact disc (CD) publishing techniques to complement the resulting printed book. Successful experience was gained at the Santa Fe meeting for which CDs were the primary information delivery mechanisms (http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/SANTA_FE_CD-ROM/main.html). Such a combination of web-site and compact disc provides the additional capability at low cost and great convenience for:
The web site, established before the meeting, will be maintained afterward through NCGIA. This site will provide both a common development medium for contributors and an interactive, on-demand delivery mechanism for users who wish to view or download its contents at any time. A pre-conference CD produced from the contents of the web site will be created just prior to the meeting to be distributed to participants as an on-site proceedings. Personal computers and/or CD viewers will be available at the meeting. A limited number of CD’s will be made available for purchase by those who express interest but can not attend.
A post-conference CD is being considered as a companion to the final proceedings, which will be a systematic, reference qualify treatment of the program subjects. The book will be provided to all participants after the conference by mail. Timing will be subject to editorial and printing processes. A limited surplus of books is planned for strategic use by the Core Planning Group. Additional interest in the book will be handled by sales through the selected publisher. A continued commercial and educational interest is expected to be generated by this book. A post-conference CD may be included with the book to contain complementary material. The CD may also be made available as an alternate record of the meeting, more enduring than the web site and less restrictive than the book.
Budget
Support by NSF has been provided for graduate student participation, a modest portion of the total estimated budget required to plan, organize, convene, and document the proposed conference. Other funding must be provided by institutional and agency sponsors and by registration fees. Core Planning Group participants have committed their time as support in kind and will not be reimbursed for time or salary. Most costs of convening the meeting, including facilities and on-site services will be paid from fees and donor funds.
Funding requested or available from other institutions, agencies and organizations
This conference, like those that preceded it, will be co-funded at a significant level by environmental, resource, and scientific agencies and organizations (donors). Continued support has been pledged by the following:
Integral to this conference is the expanded involvement and cooperation of other agencies, research institutions, and scientific societies. The collaborative and cross-disciplinary aspects of the forum will be enhanced through active alliance with new or renewing sponsors such as:
Action requested
Continued success of these meetings, and accomplishments spawned by them, depends on many separate contributions and upon the creative influence and sustained effort of those who support and implement them. Funds to support early design, development, and operation must be obtained; program contributors must be recruited and guided; and the communication environment for participants and resulting information products must be created. We invite inquiries and participation in the following categories of support:
A. Advance development funding
Financial support is requested from agencies, foundations, and enterprises with mutual interest in improved predictive capability for sound, science-based decision making and management. New contributors are encouraged to join past and current contributors (above) to support planning for the Banff program. Funding in increments of $10,000 or more is invited to augment "seed" funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
B. Endorsement and institutional support in kind
Other tactical support is encouraged from institutions and agencies including endorsement for funding, coordination with other modeling and GIS-related advisory and development bodies, and collaboration on scientific issues pertaining to conference design and support.
C. Program contributions and nominations
Seminar, special topic, and key-note speakers and presenters are solicited subject to the scope and content of the draft program (available soon). A call for contributions as papers, workshops, posters or demonstrations is available via the conference web site (below). Suggestions are welcome.
Responses and inquiries
Additional information is available via the web at http://www.colorado.edu/research/cires/banff/. Email correspondence may be addressed directly to the Conference Secretariat at
GISEM4@colorado.edu. To discuss the conference program or contributions to it, contact the conference director or co-director (see page 2) or send correspondence to:
References cited
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