Urbanisation and agriculture are one of the many drivers of biodiversity change. Photo credit: Aravindan Ganesan.

Interdisciplinary model integration thematic session at BES2019

Tue 10 Dec, 2019 to Fri 13 Dec, 2019

Belfast ICC, Belfast, Northern Ireland


We are lucky to be joining a fantastic session line-up with our thematic session on Interdisciplinary model integration to better understand biodiversity change at this year’s BES annual meeting in Belfast.

The main drivers of global biodiversity change are climate change, land-use change, pollution and overfishing, which result directly from human-mediated activities, transgress ecosystems and political borders, and act globally. For a more complete understanding of biodiversity changes, integrating models from different disciplines at large spatial and temporal scales is crucial. Interdisciplinary approaches to biodiversity assessment have received increasing attention in recent years, particularly with the launch of the new BES People and Nature journal. The surge in efforts to provide a more complete picture of the socioeconomic and biophysical drivers of biodiversity change highlights new computational possibilities, unprecedented data availability, and a fast-growing acknowledgement of the importance of driver interactions across disciplines and spatial scales.

Our thematic session will put the spotlight on this emerging area of research and help identify the potential for future directions and rapid developments in the field. Specifically, we will:

  1. provide a unique showcase of conceptual approaches and methodological tools currently used in integrated biodiversity assessment,
  2. contribute to a better understanding of interdisciplinary system complexity in such assessments,
  3. highlight strategies to reduce model and prediction uncertainty, and
  4. enhance the set of robust tools available to inform policy.

Further details and the session schedule will be published through the official BES2019 programme release. A full list of thematic sessions is available here.