2008 World Conference on Natural Resource Modeling

Warsaw, Poland, June 15-18, 2008

Keynote Speakers

Oscar Garcia

Professor and Endowed Chair in Forest Growth and Yield at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.

Plant individual-based modelling: More than meets the eye

Oscar received a professional forester degree (Ingeniero Forestal) and an M.Sc. in Mathematical Statistics & Operations Research from the University of Chile, and a Ph.D. in Forest Resources from the University of Georgia, USA. Between 1976 and 1992 he worked in New Zealand for the Forest Research Institute, developing forest management planning decision-support systems and being responsible for much of their plantation-growth modeling program. Later, he led a Government/Industry cooperative eucalypt modeling project in Chile, and conducted forest planning research in Spain for the Galician Government. He occupied the Chair of Forest Mensuration at the Universidad Austral de Chile, and has held Guest Professor positions at the ENGREF in France, KVL in Denmark, and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain.

Ed Green

Natural Resource Modeling - The View From Forest Science

Ed Green, our third guest speaker, is a 3-term member of the Forest Science Editorial Board and will also be our host editor after the conference for the special issue of Forest Science that will be dedicated to the papers presented at the conference.

Ed received his BS in Forestry (76) and MS in Silviculture (79) from CESF, Syracuse. While pursuing an MS in Silviculture, he took courses in sampling and regression from Mike Cunia, who shifted Ed’s interests from Silviculture to Biometrics. Ed got his PhD from Virginia Tech under Harold Burkhart, and then joined Rutgers in 1981. At Rutgers Ed pursued his interest in Bayesian techniques and began to collaborate extensively with Bill Strawderman, a world-renowned expert in empirical Bayes methods, who drew Ed into becoming a more fully committed Bayesian. Ed is one of the founding members of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

Ed served 3 terms on the Editorial Board of Forest Science. In 2004 he was elected as Fellow of the American Statistical Association and appointed Editor of Forest Science. He has since been re-appointed, and is the only Editor to serve a second term.

Ed will speak on Natural Resource Modeling - The View From Forest Science. In this presentation, he will discuss trends in modeling that he has observed as Associate Editor and Editor of Forest Science. He will include observations on where we've been and where we seem to be going.

Kim Iles

Walter Bitterlich

Kim Iles is an expert in sampling and forest inventory and inventor of many new statistical estimators. He got his B.S. in Forest Management and M.Sc. in Forest Biometrics from Oregon State University, and Ph.D. in Forest Biometrics from University of British Columbia in 1979. He was the Biometrician and Head of the Growth and Yield Dept. at MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. in Nanaimo, B.C. for 12 years until 1991 and a consultant since then. He is the author of a textbook on Forest Inventory (now in second printing), and he was the principle inventory design consultant for the British Columbia Provincial Inventory design (this inventory covered an area of 250,000,000 acres (100,000,000 hectares). Kim’s specialties of Variable Plot Sampling and 3P sampling are the dominant inventory systems used in the North America. He has taught inventory techniques to several thousand professional cruisers on 3 continents, and is the major contributor to the Cruising and Inventory Newsletter published by John Bell & Associates. He has been a member of several committees of national standing, and has developed and introduced a number of innovations in cruising systems in North America.