Training School

Sun 19th April 2026 - Fri 24th April 2026 in Brasov, Romania

Organizer: DSS4ES Core Group and OptForEU Partners

The Training School on decision support in providing Forest Ecosystem Services for Climate Resilience and Decarbonisation in Brasov, Romania (19.04.-24.04.2026) intends to focus on several aspects related to the development and application of forest management DSS. The aim is to make applicants familiar with the challenges of DSS development, give insight to existing DSS cases and allow them to learn about projects focusing on decision support systems.

The training school will concentrate on the theory of decision sciences, case studies and practical training examples. It will include topics related to the forest management for providing forest ecosystem services, in particular focusing on challenges related to spatial planning; predicting forest dynamics under climate change and modelling trade offs of different ecosystem services.

Conference

Mon 4th May 2026 - Tue 5th May 2026 in Vienna, Austria

Organizer: EGU General Assembly

Forests and surrounding landscapes are interconnected, and any human activities are integral elements of the socio-ecological system. Forest landscape management usually involves multi-stakeholder interventions to negotiate and implement management actions for local livelihoods, health and well-being. In this context integrated Decision Support Systems (DSS) are needed that help to address ecosystem services at the landscape scale by linking forest, agricultural and landscape interactions. The main aim of this inter- and transdisciplinary session is to identify solutions that use new and innovative methodological approaches in decision support, focusing on holistic planning to enhance sustainable ecosystem management and address ecosystem services, risks, and uncertainties. Computerized decision support systems (DSS) are know to support planning and decision making in semi- and unstructured decision problems. In that context database systems are often linked with analytical models and expert knowledge to take informed and data-driven decisions and allow managers visualizations by various graphical and tabular means. The first generation of DSSs was typically designed to address relatively narrow, well-defined problems for only one ecosystem service (e.g. timber production or increasing the resistance against storms). There has been a trend towards the development of more integrated DSS that simultaneously cover a broader range of ES such as habitat for biodiversity conservation and water provision, but there are still few examples for landscape management. This session invites contributions that bring together the scientific advances in this direction by presenting frameworks off integrated DSS and advandced combinations of methods, models and data to support decison making.

The call for abstracts is open until 15 January 2026, 13:00 CET

More information can be found here: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU26/session/57590

Working Group Meeting

Mon 4th May 2026 - Tue 5th May 2026 in Vienna, Austria

Organizer: BOKU University

We will utilize the opportunity of the Working Group Meeting from WG1 and WG2 to organize a writing retreat and push the work on the planned review papers. The work is a follow up on the activities that have started in the meeting in Warsaw https://www.dss4es.com/en/news/productive-joint-workshop-of-working-groups-1-2-held-in-warsaw/ 

More information about the venue at BOKU can be found here: https://boku.ac.at/en/