European Aquatic Modelling Network

COST Action 626

Minutes of 3rd Management Committee Meeting

Vigo, Spain, November 9, 2001

 

Prepared by Martin Baptist

 

 

Attendants MC meeting

Atle Harby (Norway, chairman), Emil Fulajtar (EU), Teppo Vehanen (Finland), Javier Alba Tercedor (Spain), Peter Goethals (Belgium), Anton Ibbotson (England), Harm Duel (Netherlands, minutes of meeting), Klaus Jorde (Germany), Stefan Schmutz (Austria), Peter Borsanyi (Norway), Mike Dunbar (England), Castor Guisande (Spain), Helmut Mader (Austria), Henry Michel Gauchie (Luxemburg), Martin Baptist (Netherlands), Simon Nemtzov (Isreal), Nicolai Friberg (Denmark), Natasa Smolar-Zvanut (Slovenia), Tomas Kramer (Hungary), Jean Michel Olivier (France), Mari Nykänen (Finland), Olle Calles (Sweden), Armin Peter (Switzerland).

 

Agenda Management Committee meeting

Approved.

 

Report from 2nd MC meeting

Minutes from 2nd meeting are not available. The chairman will prepare those minutes for the next MC meeting.

 

COST Secretariat news

Mr. Emil Fulajtar is the new scientific secretary for COST Environment replacing Mr. Laszlo Szendrodi since 15th July. He introduced himself with short curriculum and provided a brief information on news from COST secretariat. At this moment, 11 actions are running, and 1 new action proposal is under discussion. Emil presented some guidelines for preparing an integrated programme of management committee meeting and working group meetings.

Last year, the costs of the Costs Actions on Environment exceeded the budget available. So there will be a limitation of MC meetings (2x per year) and number of participants reimbursed per meeting per country.

 

New Partners

Greece is accepted as a new member state. At this moment there are 17 member states.

Cyprus is interested to participate in Cost Action 626. So far, we received, however, no names and curriculum vitae of scientists from Cyprus. Deadline for submitting curriculum vitae of scientists is December 1, 2001. If we receive no curriculum vitae before December 1, Cyprus will be rejected as a member state of Cost Action 626.

 

Progress of Task 1

Progress is a little behind schedule for several reasons:

ˇ       it takes time for organising and structuring the activities of the Cost Action

ˇ       the scope became wider and wider

ˇ       the group was expanding

Because WG 1 needs more time to finalise the state of art on data, it is not possible to finalise the task 1 report at the end of this year. The draft state of the art report (Task 1 report) will be ready before the next MC meeting. Overall co-ordinator of Task 1 Report is the chairman.

It was concluded, that the program of the actions should not be thematically more extended, because that can influence negatively the following of the time schedule of the planned works and it can became a limiting factor for deepening of the knowledge on the key topics.

The MC members had questions to key administrative issues. The secretary should collect information on the budgetary situation of the action and on the possibilities to prepare the publications during the duration of the action and provide it to Management Committee.

 

Plans for future activities (Task B)

This will be discussed thoroughly at the next meeting.

Items popped up during this MC meeting:

ˇ       cross-links between the working groups are not sufficiently intensive. To establish these links and to make them well working will be one of main administrative tasks of the management committee in close future.

ˇ       development of modelling framework instead of developing new models

ˇ       co-operation between partners: e.g. using each others data sets and models.

 

Next meetings

The next two meetings will be organised in:
Oulu, Finland, May 30-31, 2002
Aix-en-Provence, France, November 14-15, 2002

The chairman needs the names of the participants for those meetings before December 1, 2001. The Action Members, who want to attend the meetings should send an email to the chairman (email: atle.harby@energy.sintef.no).

Suggestions for invited speakers should be send by email to the chairman.

 

Internet

For presentation of the results of the Action the webb page was created.

Internet site EAMN: www.eamn.org

Webmaster: Peter Borsanyi (peter.borsanyi@bygg.ntnu.no)

 

Short Term Scientific Missions

Objective: exchange of young scientists from different countries

Minimal duration of mission: 3 days.

Maximum duration of mission: 1 month.

Application criteria and application form: see www.eamn.org

First deadline for application: December 1, 2001.

Co-ordinator STSM: Helmut Mader (mader@edv2.boku.ac.at)

 

The secretary will monitor the procedure of the STSM contract approval. Moreover, he will check whether it is allowed to send more than 1 researcher to the same institute.

 

 

 

Plenary session: MC + working groups

 

Report form Working Group activities

The presentations of the working group activities will be available on internet as soon as possible: www.eamn.org

Mike Dunbar: contents of SoA report, future activities of WG3

Martin Baptist: research needs on modelling: 32 items categorised into 6 groups.

Graig Elliot: what are models, why, when and how to use models, uncertainty.

Franz Kerle: upscaling and downscaling (spatial, temporal, complexity)

Stefan Schmutz: general structure of SoA report on data, deadlines WG1:

            December 1, 2001: returning questionnaires

            February 1, 2002: draft SoA report

            March 1, 2002: comments on draft report

            April 1, 2002: final approved report

Peter Mayr: SoA of instrumentation and measurement techniques

Gerbot Koboltschnig: results of questionnaire on abiotics

Peter Gothals: results of questionnaire on macro-invertebrates (for the time being)

 

Miscellaneous

ˇ       Klaus Jorde needs volunteers (trainers) for the habitat modelling course in Cape Town (South Africa).

ˇ       Tor Ziegler is preparing a twinning project for EAMN: for information, please contact Atle Harby.

ˇ       There are several positions available for master student at the Idaho University: for information please contact Klaus Jorde. 

 

Conclusions

 

The amount of questionnaires collected and submitted by particular participating counties have been evaluated.

The strengthening of links between the working groups will be one of key tasks for next Management Committee Meeting. The next key task is to attract the attention of end users and to build an intensive contact with them. The co-operation with end users and the practical implementing of the results is a major goal of the action.