iLand

an individual-based forest landscape and disturbance model

Welcome to the iLand platform! This website gives an overview over project aims and context as well as the iLand project team. Its main purpose is to serve as hub for model development and project management. Project news and related publications will also be made available via this site.

iLand in brief

iLand is a research effort by a team of scientists in Austria and the US Pacific Northwest to advance forest landscape and disturbance modelling. Motivated by the expected distinct climate change impacts on forest dynamics and an increasing importance of disturbances in forestry iLand aims at enhancing analytic capacities in support of sustainable forest management. The rationale of iLand is to introduce aspects of individual-based modelling to the landscape scale in order to address interactions (between individuals, disturbance agents) in a process-based manner as emerging properties of the system. iLand is a three year effort and will result in a simulation framework (open source, later in the course of the project available from this website). The project is mainly funded by a Marie Curie Scholarship within the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission.

iLand and model complexity

Want to know more about the ideas guiding model development? Wondering what iLands 'niche' in the landscape of existing forest ecosystem models is? Interested in how we address different dimensions of ecological complexity in iLand? Check out the wiki article on model complexity in iLand and its niche in the complexity landscape of existing models.

iLand word cloud

A word cloud of the iLand research proposal.

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