Global Land Project Open Science Meeting 2010 and the International Conference on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change

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As sustainability science research enters its adolescence, several facets of it have emerged as instrumental for global environmental change, climate change, and sustainable development. Among these, land change and urbanization are so pivotal that they are the subjects of international programs of study under the auspices of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). The Global Land Project (GLP) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme joins environmental, remote sensing-GIS, and social-human sciences in the study of land systems and their change as coupled human-environment systems. The Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) project, established in 2006 and sponsored by the International Human Dimensions Programme, seeks to galvanize international research that fuses urban dynamics with environment. In recognition of the overlapping interests of the international research communities that these projects are nurturing, the GLP and UGEC projects will conduct overlapping open science meetings at Arizona State University on October 15-19, 2010. The GLP and UGEC open science meetings will be comprised of plenary, open paper, and poster sessions and are expected to draw 500 and 300 people respectively. In addition, each project will sponsor a special workshop designed to produce major forum articles for publication soon after the meetings that will address critical themes for sustainability science. October 17 will constitute an overlap day between the two projects in which the theme will be urban, land, and environment. Presentations and activities on this day will seek to improve ties and develop new research initiatives between the projects and related communities of researchers. This award will provide support to facilitate the involvement of members of underrepresented groups, early-career scientists, and scientists from developing nations in the GLP and UGEC open science meetings.This group-travel award, which will complement awards made by other organizations, will facilitate the involvement in these critical meetings of researchers who might otherwise have difficulty participating in these meetings. The meetings will encourage development of new initiatives and synthesis of findings from past and current research. They also will advance the research capacity for the conduct of larger-scale, highly interdisciplinary, internationally collaborative research on a broad range of topics, such as ecology, ecosystem services, and climate change; remote sensing methods and land monitoring; agent-based, econometric, and spatial models of land change; land-tenure institutions; relationships between population and technology; and vulnerability and sustainability. The meetings also will enhance the policy-relevance of integrated urban-environmental models and assessments, improving capabilities for dealing with issues of uncertainty and explicitly addressing the need for multidimensional, data-driven policy making for urban sustainability.