Symposium SSAFR2024

The Symposium: The 20^th SSAFR took place May 13-17, 2024 in Hondarribia, Basque Country, Spain. It involved 99 participants from 24 countries in Europe, Africa, America, Oceania and Asia. Its program encompassed 6 keynote presentations by Drs. Bruce Bare and Sándor Toth focusing on the history of SSAFR, Dr. Margarida Tomé who discussed forest models and simulators in a global change context and the need for their improvement/adaptation to current forestry requirements, by Dr. Oscar Garcia who made an introduction to forest modelling with stochastic differential equations, by Dr. Keith Reynolds who presented an update on the Ecosystem Management Decision Support System (EMDS), by Dr. Pablo Asiron who presented the Remsoft approach to application of optimization analytics for solving modern-day forestry planning challenges and by Dr. Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo who presented the European Union H2020 DecisionES project and discussed its strategy to enhance forest management planning and policy analysis by evolving an integrated and multifunctional ecosystem services supply approach. It encompassed further 91 oral presentations organized into 24 sessions focusing on themes such as a) Application of Remote Sensing In Forestry, b) Forest Modelling, c) Forest management and planning, d) Forest transportation and supply chain optimization, d) Wildfire risk simulation, management and decision support, e) Forest health, invasive species, and wildlife habitat management, f) Spatially explicit optimization, g) Stochastic process simulation and optimization, h) Quantitative forest and fire economics, i) Forest and watershed management, j) Data science and machine learning and k) Forest systems analysis under the impact of climate change

The conference worked well as a meeting place for experts on system analysis in a broad sense. It brought together researchers at very different stages of their careers, from PhD students to researchers taking part in the very beginning of the SSAFR series, and from different continents. The arrangements in Hondarribia was ideal for the conference and the 3 days of scientific work included a much appraised visit to the historical center of the city.