Economic, social, and cultural values and beliefs greatly influence behavior and decision-making. Understanding people’s feelings and perceptions can have a tremendous impact on coastal management efforts. The Social Coast Forum is all about the “people” side of coastal management, focused on the application of social science to coastal management.

Call for Abstracts
Abstracts due September 27, 2021

Details and Registration
Register by February 1, 2022

Registration and Call for Abstracts

The Gulf of Mexico Conference (GoMCon) is scheduled for April 25-28, 2022 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. GoMCon combines the annual Gulf of Mexico Alliance All Hands Meeting, the annual Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference, and the tri-annual State of the Gulf Summit. Emphasizing the intersection of science and management across the Gulf Coast region, GoMCon will include sessions on themes that are important to ecosystem and community resilience as well as restoration and natural resource management.

Registration is $250 for the entire four days and is now open!
Register Now

The GoMCon Program Committee invites you to submit an abstract for a presentation that promotes the integration of science and management into decision-making in these conference themes:

• Resilience
• Living Resources
• Science, Management, Practice, and Policy
• Climate Impacts
• Water and Sediment Management
• Citizen Science, Education, Communication, and Extension
• Water Quality and Quantity
• Habitat Management and Restoration
• Emerging Issues

The deadline for abstract submissions is November 12, 2021.
Submit an Abstract

GoMCon is hosted by the Gulf of Mexico Alliance with sponsorship support from numerous partners. Contact Becky Ginn (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for more information on becoming a conference sponsor.

The DSSAT Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Florida and the International Fertilizer Development Center, is planning to host the international training program entitled DSSAT 2022 - "Assessing Crop Production, Water and Nutrient Management, Climatic Risk and Environmental Sustainability with Simulation Models" from May 16 through May 21, 2022 at the University of Georgia Campus in Griffin, Georgia, USA.

Rationale:

Today more than ever, increased crop production depends on judicious use of resources. In addition, issues such as climate change, climate variability, soil carbon sequestration, biofuels, long-term food security, and environmental sustainability have become important issues. Computer simulation models of the soil/plant/atmosphere system can make a valuable contribution to both furthering our understanding of the processes that determine crop responses and predicting crop performance, resource use, and environmental impacts for different environments and management scenarios. User-oriented simulation models greatly facilitate the task of optimizing crop growth and deriving recommendations concerning crop management. They can also be used to determine the potential impact of climate change on crop production and long-term soil carbon sequestration, or provide management scenarios for adapting to climate change and variability.

The overall goal of the workshop is to familiarize participants with the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT v4.x); the Cropping System Model (CSM) for the simulation of crop growth and yield, soil and plant water, nutrient, and carbon dynamics; and the application of  models to real world problems, such as crop and resource management, climate change and climate variability, carbon sequestration, food security, biofuels, and environmental sustainability.

The program will focus on:

• Operation of the Windows-based Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) Version 4.8 software. (http://www.dssat.net/)
• Description of the DSSAT-Cropping System Model, CSM and its modules, such as CROPGRO and CERES, and the science embedded in the models.
• Minimum data requirements and experimental data collection for systems simulation.
• Integration of crop simulation models with data base management and Geographical Information Systems.
• Application of the DSSAT-CSM model to improve management of cropping systems.

|Details and registration|

The Climate Leader is an online training in systems thinking to help fuel the global response to climate change. These materials will help you to be more effective at addressing climate change by enabling you to see the interconnections and big picture in your work. Behind the Climate Leader are decades of experience from the team at Climate Interactive and powerful ideas developed at MIT.

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The Northern Gulf of Mexico Sentinel Site Cooperative is happy to announce the first webinar in the webinar/workshop series "Standardizing Sea-Level Scenarios for Gulf of Mexico Projects."

Very often projects involving sea-level rise start out with the same question - how much sea-level rise and by when? Often the processes of determining which scenarios takes a great deal of time. Additionally, different projects settle on different scenarios making it difficult to compare results between projects. The Cooperative partners have identified addressing this issue as a priority goal for 2016.

The Cooperative would like to invite experts in SLR and those who frequently work on SLR projects in the Gulf to come to collaborate in identifying recommended scenarios. The goal is a suite of recommended scenarios for use across a variety of projects as well as a brief user guide to encourage its use on the Gulf Coast.

This process will take time and instead of dealing with such a large issue with such a large group in one meeting, we are planning a series of webinars and workshops. The first webinar will happen on Feb. 11 at 10 a.m. CST, and it will be a background/kick-off webinar addressing the series goals and outlining national, regional and local scenarios.

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In this webinar series, practitioners will share information, results and lessons learned through recent work by FHWA/US DOT and State and MPO partners to make the transportation system more resilient to climate change and extreme weather events. The first track focuses on the processes used in the Gulf Coast Study, Phase 2 (Mobile) and transferable methods developed for other agencies to assess the vulnerability of transportation infrastructure. The second track focuses on FHWA's recently completed Climate Resilience Pilot program, which supported 19 pilot projects around the country to assess vulnerabilities and develop strategies to make transportation infrastructure and operations more resilient to climate change and extreme weather events.

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