Modelling policy impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity: The BESTMAP Summer School

Behavioural Ecological and Socio-economic Tools for Modelling Agricultural Policy (BESTMAP) starts its first summer school on modelling policy impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity.

It is vital to understand the environmental impacts of agricultural policies, such as agri-environmental schemes (AES) or organic farming, to assess their effectiveness in European farmlands. Scientific models have a significant role in quantifying such impacts, especially on biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by the agricultural landscapes.

To explore this further, BESTMAP invites PhD students, early-career researchers and Masters students with relevant backgrounds in the field of agriculture-environment interactions to their Summer School in Olomouc, Czech Republic from September 12 to 16, 2022.

The three main objectives of BESTMAP’s summer school are:

Obtain an introduction to different modelling approaches, including
- agent-based modelling,
- biodiversity/species distribution modelling, and
- ecosystem services modelling (both provisioning and regulating ecosystem services)
Learn through practical, interactive exercises about the potentials and limitations of the different modelling approaches
Get hands-on experience with specific models by applying them to real-world data from BESTMAP case studies

You can download the full agenda here.

The summer school is being organised in conjunction with Palacky University Olomouc, University of Leeds, UFZ–Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, TU Dresden and other partners involved in the European project BESTMAP. Eminent scholars of the field will join the event as BESTMAP lecturers, including:

Guy Ziv and Arjan Gosal from University of Leeds,UK
Meike Will, Birgit Müller, Anne Paulus and Michael Beckmann from UFZ–Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, DE
Stephanie Roilo and Anna Cord from Technische Universität Dresden, DE
Tomáš Václavík, Marek Bednář, Bořivoj Šarapatka and Petr Marada from Palacky University Olomouc, CZ.

Registration and attendance are free of charge. Participants are required to cover their travel and accommodation expenses.

However, the BESTMAP team is able to support three participants with a travel award of 300 EUR. If you would like to apply for the travel award, please upload the PDF of your Statement of Purpose in the registration form, specifying why you are applying for the travel award and how the Summer School may be beneficial for your future career.

BESTMAP’s team invites you to register for the Summer School by filling out the online form by August 12, 2022.