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From September 4-8 the POLISES working group participated in the 9th European Conference on Ecological Modelling, ECEM 2023, which was hosted at the UFZ. The ECEM is launched by the European chapter of the international society of ecological modeling (ISEM). This year, many people from the Department of Ecological Modelling at the UFZ were involved in the organization of the conference. Including Julia, who was managing the social media accounts and took pictures at the event. 

The ECEM aims to bring together current research efforts for advancing ecological modelling in the face of challenges imposed by the need of transforming the way societies deal with natural resources. This can include strategies and models that improve model-data fusion, upscaling issues or investigation of management scenarios. The conference consisted of several lecture sessions each of which had their own thematic focus. One of those sessions was called “Modelling change in socio-ecological systems” and was organized by Birgit. Here, Julia also got to present her PhD project for the first time on an international conference. Kaja presented her work in the associated poster session. 

During the workshops on participatory modelling and participatory explorative stakeholder modelling, we gained knowledge on how to involve stakeholders in the modelling process, e.g. by developing a causal loop diagram. Obsidian was presented as an effective tool for note-taking and could be a new tool used by some POLISES members for their personal work organisation. Thus, the conference had a variety of outcomes: feedback on the work in POLISES, inspiration from other topics, networking with old and new contacts, as well as training in methodological skills.