October 19 to 22 the University of Copenhagen will host the international conference on “Managing the urban rural interface”, related to the PLUREL project. RIKS will present three papers on this conference, in the sessions about “Instruments and tools for Sustainability Impact Assessment” and “Urban-rural regions in a globalised world – driving forces on land use change”.

• Jasper van Vliet

RIKS recently joined the consortium of FP6 project PLUREL (Peri-urban Land Use Relationships). Within this project RIKS will develop MOLAND-Light, a web based, a web-based tool that allows users to easily asses future land developments for European regions. We will announce on this website when the tool becomes publicly available, in the meantime you can read more about our contribution to this project here.

• Jasper van Vliet

Recently RIKS presented at the iEMSs 2010 conference in Ottawa, Canada and the DDSS 2010 conference in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The three papers that were presented are now available from our publications page.

• Jasper van Vliet

RIKS recently started working on the TICAD project. This project comprises the development and implementation of a spatial decision support system that integrates land-use and hydrological components into one system. More information can be found on the TICAD project page.

• Jasper van Vliet

July 19 to 22 the Technical University Eindhoven will host the 10th international conference on Design and Decision support systems in architecture and urban planning (DDSS 2010). Tuesday morning RIKS will present one of her tailor made systems, the Xplorah SDSS, in session TU1.1 – Integral planning support.

• Jasper van Vliet

July 5 - 8 2010 the International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs2010) will be held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. On this conference Hedwig van Delden will present papers in two sessions. One paper on user interaction during the development of the Waikato Integrated Scenario Explorer in session S11, and one paper the integration of economic and land use change models in session S16.

• Jasper van Vliet

The international environmental modelling and software society (iEMSs) selects each year the best papers published in its journal in three different categories. For 2009 the paper “A formal framework for scenario development in support of environmental decision-making”, coauthored by Hedwig van Delden was selected for the award in the category “integrated modelling”. The awards will be presented at the Fifth Biennial meeting of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society, held in Ottawa, Canada from July 5–8, 2010.

• Jasper van Vliet

On June 1st and 2nd RIKS organized a training course for the Metronamica land use model. With participants from various institutes over Europe the course turned an interesting forum for land use modelers. Due to high interest RIKS organizes a Metronamica training course on June 15th and June 16th, for which there are still places available. When you are interested in attending this course, please contact Roel Vanhout.

• Jasper van Vliet

We are happy to inform that two research papers are accepted for publication, discussing the LUMOCAP PSS and the RIKS approach to model integration respectively:

Van Delden, H., Stuczynski, T., Ciaian, P., Paracchini, M.L., Hurkens, J., Lopatka, A., Shi, Y.E., Prieto, O.G., Calvo, S., Van Vliet, J. and Vanhout, R.,
Integrated assessment of agricultural policies with dynamic land use change modelling,
Ecological Modelling. DOI:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.03.023

Van Delden, H., Seppelt, R., White, R. and Jakeman, A.J.,
A methodology for the design and development of integrated models for policy support,
Environmental Modelling and Software. DOI 10.1016/j.envsoft.2010.03.021

• Jasper van Vliet

RIKS was recently awarded a contract for a two year project that aims to build an SDSS for the Tisza river basin, a tributary to the Danube River. This SDSS will include the Metronamica land use model as well as MIKE SHE, a hydrological model developed by DHI. More information about the project will follow soon in the overview of our projects.

• Jasper van Vliet