NATURAL RESOURCE MODELING Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2004
EDITORIAL NOTE ON SPECIAL ISSUE The 2002 World Conference on Natural Resource Modelling was held in June, 2002 at the small picturesque port of Sigri on Lesvos Island, Greece. The Congress Centre of the Natural Museum of Petrified Forest provided modern facilities in this ancient and beautiful setting. Lesvos is Greece’s third largest island located at the easternmost part of the Aegean Archipelago, with a rich history and varied, fascinating scenery. Its natural attractions include extensive olive fields, pine forests and Mediterranean type shrubs. This changing landscape is the subject of one of the papers included in this issue. The appropriateness of the venue can be gauged by the intellectual stimulation it has provided to others in the past. Lesvos is the birthplace of Theophrastos, considered to be the “father” of botany. Also of the illustrious ancient poets Sappho and Alkaios, the guitarist Arion, the musician Terpander, and Pittakos of Mytilene, one of the Seven Sages of antiquity. The tradition of producing famous artists, poets and writers continues today. Despite the remoteness of the venue, the conference attracted a good representation of participants from Europe and North America with many other countries represented from as far away as New Zealand. Three invited plenary speakers dealt with the conference theme ‘Modelling Natural and Biotic Resources in a Changing Planet.’ The speakers and the title of their talks comprised the following: Wolfgang Cramer, Department of Global Change and Natural Systems, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, “Assessing global change impacts on ecosystem services: interfacing ‘hard science’ and stakeholders”; Michel Loreau, Laboratoire d’ Ecologie, Ecole Normale Superieure, France, “Modelling biodiversity and ecosystem functioning; current trends and future challenges”; Marten Scheffer, Department of Environmental Sciences, Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group, Wageningen University, Netherlands, “Non-linear response of ecosystems to global change”. c Copyright 2004 Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium
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J. HEARNE AND Y. MATSINOS
While the plenary talks dealt with the conference theme, in keeping with all conferences organized under the banner of the Resource Modeling Association other speakers covered a diverse range of topics. This diversity of problems, modeling techniques and geographical locations, is illustrated by the seven papers selected from the conference talks for this special issue of Natural Resource Modeling. The following problems are dealt with in the papers included in this issue: • The optimal extraction of a non-renewable resource with a pollution cost • Determining fire occurrence patterns at the landscape level • Inferring a biopolitical consensus view for management of a transboundary fishery • Analysis of bioeconomic interactions relating to a fishery exclusion zone • Investigation of the policy and social impacts of an agricultural landscape • Identification of habitat changes on Lesvos island that pose the greatest threat to the viability of its squirrel population • Establishing the relationship between sea surface temperature and the nesting activities of turtles These papers cover a range of mathematical and computational techniques. They include applications or involve data from Japan, Sicily, northern Greece and very appropriately Lesvos Island itself. The broad range of applications and techniques that appear in this special issue provides a representative sample of the nature of conferences in the series ‘World Conference in Natural Resource Modelling’. It is also typical of current resource modeling activities in general. John Hearne School of Mathematical & Geospatial Sciences RMIT University GPO Box 2476V Melbourne 3001, Australia E-mail:
[email protected]
Yiannis Matsinos Dept. of Environmental Sciences University of the Aegean Xenia Hill MS 308 Mytilene, Lesvos 81100 Greece E-mail:
[email protected]
