Understanding the dynamic of natural systems

Understanding the dynamics of natural systems is often a complicated endeavor and requires dealing with responses to a changing environment, unobservable system states, or abrupt transitions. Many natural systems (e.g. biological or ecological) might additionally experience modifications of their intrinsic dynamics over their lifetime e.g. through long-range evolution or short-term adaptation. This remark holds true at various levels of organization from single organs, over organisms, organismic interactions, ecosystem dynamics, to the entire coupled biosphere-climate system.

Typically, dynamic phenomena are investigated either from a theoretical point of view or by following a rather empirical path via observations. Today model-data integration opportunities also allow integrating theory and observations to gain a deeper insight into the behavior of natural systems. However, young scientists generally receive little training and insight into dealing with both empirical and theoretical approaches for achieving a better understanding of dynamical systems of interest.

This autumn school aims at bringing together PhD students and experts in multiple related fields ranging from autonomous and non-autonomous dynamical systems empirical analysis of nonlinear processes and model-data integration. Scientists experienced in applying novel concepts to study natural phenomena are bridging the gap between theory and application, hence offering novel perspectives to the students.

This one-week autumn school aims at providing an overview of relevant developments in this very broad field to stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue and advance in the respective PhD (or potentially MSc. or PostDoc) projects. Hands-on tutorials will demonstrate to the students how recent methods can be effectively implemented and will give ample space to discuss applications to novel problems.

The autumn school takes place from September 26 to 30, 2016 at MPI for Biogeochemistry.
Miguel Mahecha, Markus Reichstein and Carlos Sierra from our institute are co-organizers of this challenging workshop.

Contact:
Miguel Mahecha
E-Mail: mmahecha@bgc-jena.mpg.de
Phone: +49 (0)3641 57 6265