Today I started thinking in earnest about the 2008 US-IALE Symposium to be held in Madison, Wisconsin early next month.

I’ll be presenting a poster on our early model development work on the USDA deer/timber regeneration project at CSIS. I will also be chairing the Landscape Change session which has presentations discussing change within and across a diverse range of landscapes including, the Great Plains of the US, the Bolivian Andes and Ukrainian Carpathian mountain ranges, Boreal and Tropical forests, and the Congo Basin.

Whilst in Madison I also plan on attending sessions, symposia, workshops and field-trips devoted to Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Processes, Modeling Forest Landscapes under Climate Change, Multifunctional Agricultural Landscapes, Forest Landscapes, and Fire. At this last session I’m particularly looking forward to the presentation entitled “Ecological complexity produces simple structure: Power laws in low-severity fire regimes” by Don McKenzie, co-convener of the wildfires session at EGU 2008 the following week (but which I will not be attending).

There will be plenty of other activity by members of CSIS. Jack Liu, president-elect of US-IALE, and CSIS PhD student Vanessa Hull are co-organising the H. Ronald Pulliam Symposium: Sources, Sinks, and Sustainability. Mao-Ning Tuanmu (PhD student) will be making a presentation entitled “Detecting understory vegetation using MODIS data: Implications for giant panda habitat evaluations” in the Remote Sensing session, and Wei Liu (also CSIS PhD student) will present “Conservation success leads to human-wildlife conflicts: Spatial patterns of crop damages and livestock depredation in Wolong Nature Reserve for Giant Pandas, China” in the Social Issues session.

And there’s loads more going on so it promises to be an interesting and busy week! If I get online during a spare 5 minutes I’ll see if I can blog an update on how it’s all going…