1st Open Science Meeting

The aim of the 1st Open Science Meeting 'Land Systems, global change and sustainability' was to bring together large parts of the international research community working on land change issues, showcase the width and scope of ongoing research, help build a community in this highly interdisciplinary field, inspire new research, and facilitate review, theory building and extrapolation. A major theme running throughout both the UGEC and GLP conferences, and the focus of the overlapping day are the linkages among urbanization, land and landscapes, and climate change: The themes embedded in these linkages, constitute one of the next phases of emphasis in global change and climate change science as registered by the USCCP, IPCC, and other major agenda-setting reports forthcoming in the US and internationally. 
 

Scope

Intellectual Aim of the Conference
To advance the science of land systems and their change for analysis and response to global change and sustainability. 

Human transformations of the land surface of the planet are among the largest sources of change on Earth. The rapidly accelerating change of the land systems is closely related to the last decades’ unprecedented transformation of the terrestrial structure and functioning of the coupled human-environmental systems. The exploration of the coupled environment system can provide needed insight to better develop strategies for future sustainably of the land system. The transdisciplinary field of 'Land Change Science' has emerged as a fundamental component of global environmental change and sustainability research, and is at the heart of the GLP Science Plan (see below). The land systems approach requires the integration of social, ecological and geographhical information/Earth observation sciences, and faces various data, methodological and analytical challenges. 

Programme

17-19 October 2010 GLP OSM: 'Land Systems, global change and sustainability'
The Open Meeting will be organised around a number of themes, emerging from the GLP Science Plan. While important in their own right, the themes also provide conceptual and methodological insight that will be useful to investigate dynamics and resilience of land systems at local, regional or larger scales as result of the new exposures to global change. 

17 October 2010 GLP/UGEC joint day: 'Sustainable land systems in the era of urbanization and climate change'
The joint day on the 17 October will focus on: 'Sustainable land systems in the era of urbanization and climate change' and explore the numerous interacations between land-change, urbanization and climate change. This joint Conference day seeks to build contacts and networks among urban and land-change specialists to foster more collaboration worldwide, expanding the range of issues addressed.