iLand News & Blog – iLand

Release iLand 2.2

We are pleased to announce the release of iLand 2.2! Continuing our annual summer release cadence, version 2.2 combines major documentation infrastructure improvements…

Release iLand 2.1

We are excited to release iLand 2.1! Our last big release was 2.0, roughly one year ago. We will tryp to keep this cadence of releases, and release each summer a new version…

Release of iLand 2.0

We are happy to release version 2.0 of iLand! While a lot of time passed since the last major release in 2016, model development has never cased, and continued with a good…

The iLand universe is expanding

Within the frame of the RESIN project, iLand applications in Central Europe are expanding to Slovakia. A key aim of RESIN is to understand the disturbance regime of Central…

iLand 1.0 release (in numbers)

When we began working on iLand - around 2009 - we knew we that we set out for a longer journey. Today, more than 7 years after those first steps, we are proud to release…

iLand 1.0 released!

After 7.5 years of working on iLand, we’re very happy to announce the release of iLand 1.0.

Climate change and disturbance impacts on spatio-temporal trajectories of biodiversity

This is a guest post by Dominik Thom.

Diversity mitigates disturbance impact

The relationships and interactions between biodiversity and disturbance have long been a focus of ecological research (Connell 1978, Grime 1979). Furthermore, recent…

iLand @ Klimatag

We’ll be presenting the newest iLand developments at the Austrian “Klimatag” (i.e. climate day) in Vienna next week. Both Wernerand I will be giving insights into a recent…

Game of life

We are currently working on a bark beetle disturbance module for iLand (see [disturbance+modules] for a list of already existing modules). One important aspect here is the…

New iLand release 0.8!

We are happy to announce the release of a new iLand version (0.8). Its main feature is the inclusion of a dynamic fire disturbance module. The model software (including a…

Upon publication, what to archive?

The endeavor of scientific publication is changing drastically. The article published in printed periodicals has - besides books, of course - been THE single most important…

iLand on fire

Quite a while ago I’ve been blogging about a new simulation experiment that we’ve been working on using iLand. Well, the good news is that the corresponding paper was now…

a clusterful of secrets

When we started thinking about simulating forest landscapes with a crazy high (i.e. single tree) resolution and were bouncing ideas how to accomplish this back and forth, we…

On scaling (part 2)

After the theoretically motivated post about scaling not too long ago I thought that it’d be insightful to illustrate the role of scale with an example. We recently did some…

iLand v0.7 release notes

We’re happy to announce the release of a new iLand version, the first release that includes a full dynamic, process-based disturbance module.

On scaling (part 1)

I wanted to share some more thoughts on scales and scaling in ecosystem management (and subsequently in modeling) for quite a while now, and will take the recent publication…

Novelty

If it wasn’t for another round of recent technological advances (the computer world never sleeps, it seems!) it would have been seriously quiet around here recently. One…

64 bits and Qt 5

Qt 5 was released a couple of month ago (end of 2012) and now Qt 5.1 (beta) is here - which is exciting since 5.1 promises more stability and includes, most notably, Qt…

New iLand projects

It’s a new year (well, sort of… by now we’re through 10% of 2013 already, sigh), and what better way to start off the new blogging season with introducing two new…

iLand is burning!

Well, the headline might not sound as exhilarating as, for instance, Paris is burning would, but it has Werner and me quite excited in any case. After months of preparing…

Random number quality

The modeling of stochastic processes such as tree mortality or the ignition of wild fires heavily relies on “randomness”: a tree may either die or not, or a fire may start…

iLand v0.69: what’s new?

So, as already mentioned by Werner over at the tech blog, we’re happy to announce the release of a new iLand version (v0.69). This release marks the publication of another…

iLand 0.69 - the new kid on the block

After the going online of the new iLand paper in Ecosystems, we proudly present a new release of the iLand model that was described and used in the aforementioned study. The …

Gauging forest carbon with iLand

For those of you who didn’t catch the iLand presentation at ESA, here’s a short summary of what is the first fully-fledged landscape scale application of iLand (you can read…

iLand @ ESA

For those of you who happen to be in Portland for this years’ annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America: We’ll be presenting an iLand application in the…

the end is the beginning…

It’s a few weeks now since the project funding the initial development of iLand, an European Commission FP7 Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (IOF), came to a…

iLand release

We’re delighted to let you know that after more than three years of research, discussion, coding, and testing iLand is finally published. A paper describing the core…

iLand web - relaunch!!

**We are happy to announce that now large portions of the iLand wiki are now online for public access!**



During the last three and a half years, the iLand wiki…

On “publishing” a model

Publishing a model – what it is*

The fire season is (still) on!

Time for another update from the iLand world. But before I dive into the details of the “hot” topic fire disturbance: I’ve been recently checking the stats of the iLand blogs…

Vegetation snapshots and Javascript

During the last couple of weeks our efforts are concentrated on the evaluation of the currently developed fire module (see also the last blog post). Besides, we - and…

Frontiers in modeling wind disturbance

I guess it’s time for another modeling-oriented blog post, particularly since there are a lot of exciting modeling activities going on in iLand that I don’t want to keep…

Just for fun: the ‘us and them’ in science

Summers are nice for holidays, but are also the time of the year when you can actually get things done (less email, empty university corridors,…). So there’s currently quite…

Summer time is fire time

Reflecting pretty well the weather conditions outside, we recently started to implement some “hot” stuff, i.e. fire disturbances. The fire disturbance module is the first of…

Climate and vegetation changes drive disturbance increases in Europe

So one of the main ideas behind the development of iLand is, that to understand and simulate forest ecosystem dynamics with particular consideration of disturbances, an…

iLand status report

Hello world, hard to believe that two years have passed already since we started on this modeling endeavor. This also means that I (Rupert) am on my way back to Europe after…

Simulating landscape dynamics

Its time to share some more results here, particularly as I’m excited to report that we’re about to embark on the first comprehensive landscape simulation study with iLand at…

Documenting the Javascript API with Doxygen

This post will most probably be no much fun to read - much like the researching of the topic was quite … tedious. The question is how to set up a documentation of the…

Every tree counts

As you might already know, we’ve been making it our goal in iLand to “make every tree count”, i.e. to model individuals and their interactions and responses explicitly. Some…

a disturbed future?

First of all, apologies for the long intervals between posts. The fact that I haven’t been posting any news for quite a while doesn’t mean that there is no progress in our…

Linux based profiling and performance

It is more than time for another blog post here as the last post had several month to mature. The strange thing, however, is that the urge to write is always highest after…

Drinking will get you (ex)cited!

Disclaimer: This is a totally modeling-unrelated post, so no tech specs and ecology thoughts this time.

Model complexity and iLands niche in the complexity landscape of forest models

To follow up on the complexity considerations in the last blog entry, the two main hypothesis driving the development of iLand with regard to ecological complexity are:

Putting simulated forest structure to the test

I know my posts here come in irregular intervals, but there has been a lot happening in the iLand universe lately, keeping me quite busy. However, now it’s time for some…

let the seeds fly

During the last weeks we spent some time discussing the whole topic of regeneration. We are quite excited about that, because this will be the first real ‘landscape’-process…

Some performance considerations

While applying several modifications in iLand (primarily in the water cycle, see http://iland.boku.ac.at/tiki-view_tracker_item.php?itemId=30) some performance issues came…

transatlantic debugging

First, a quick note for what happened since the last post. Autumn came, the Oregon visit ended. Then winter came. Now, winter is still around - at least here in Vienna. From…

How much complexity is enough?

I guess that’s a question most if not all modelers have to deal with at some point. Because quite contrary to the first intuition it’s not making a model more complex that’s…

out of memory?

Computers are getting faster and faster and memory is hardly ever a problem any more- and this technical fast track is definitely an important factor in making a project…

Why trees grow (and how…)

How trees capture radiation energy, how efficient they are in converting it to carbon, what environmental factors (and interactions among factors) are influencing this…

Lego - or recent new building blocks

During the last 10 days (or so) the iLand platform grew remarkably, as new features were added. Some of those additions are:

Cause of death – unknown

Mortality (for this posting: tree death due to causes other than disturbance and management) is a very important process in forest ecosystem dynamics- yet our understanding…

iLand goes Linux

Up and then I think about switching to Linux, and up and then I install a Linux version somewhere on my harddrive, boot it up, play around, get stuck (usually, WLAN drivers…

Learning from LANDIS-II

One particular vision and objective with iLand is to integrate the ideas and concepts of individual based, stand level forest modeling with those of landscape ecology and…

Multithreaded iLand

Did I already mention, that Qt is just great? The issue that made me state this here is [Multithreading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithreading_(computer_hardware). As…

There is some progress

This weekend is definitely dedicated to really start hacking on the iLand modelling software. After weeks and month of preparations, theoretical considerations, the creation…

FONStudio performance

The implementation of the light competition cycle is still uncomplete (August, 14th, 2009), but it is in a shape that allows some conclusions with regard to the performance.…

A summer of model development

The summer high pressure has settled over the Pacific Northwest, temperatures are well in the 90ies (30°C) and campuses here at OSU and elsewhere are getting pretty empty……

Project kickoff - iLand on its way

Around the official project start date, April 1st 2009, we held two kick-off meetings in order to get the project team together and the work on the project finally started.…

Performance gain using SSE instructions

SSE (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2) is the multimedia extension of modern x86 Intel and AMD CPUs. Basically, using 128 bit wide registers, 4 floats (or 2 doubles)…