Next week I’ll be at the European Science Foundation workshop ‘Self-organised ecogeomorphic systems: confronting models with data for land-degradation in drylands‘ in Potsdam, Germany. We’ve been asked to provide a poster for the ice-breaker session. I’ve been busy here at CSIS with proposal writing so I had to throw something together rather quickly. Here’s a pdf of what I came up with – at the very least it should give an idea of what I’ll talk about in the session I’m contributing to on ‘Spatial modelling and analysis of self-organisation’. The workshop abstract is at the bottom and I’ll write more here after the workshop about what we talked about.

Workshop Abstract
Desertification and land degradation are major environmental problems in the EU and globally. The difficulty of understanding vegetation-environment interactions requires major changes to the ways in which dryland environments are investigated. The workshop will evaluate approaches based on complexity theory and advanced self-organized models for such investigations, and deals with the difficult issue of how to use existing data to test these approaches, as well as identify the need for new datasets. The workshop aims to provide a keystone manual in modelling and analytical approaches, and to set up interrelated networks on model and data development.