Most land change modelling treats uncertainty as a problem to be reduced. Last week in Dublin we spent a session asking what happens if you treat it as something to explore instead.

I was at the 13th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs), my second time at this conference after 2022, and it remains one of the most rewarding communities I am part of.

Together with Orlando Roman and Richard Hewitt I convened the session “Synthesising advances in uncertainty exploration in land change modelling to inform planning and policy”. Reviews of land use and land cover change (LULCC) modelling have long called for more attention to uncertainty, but most of the response has been about reducing it to improve model performance. Our aim was to bring together work that goes the other way: exploring uncertainty to support more robust and adaptive decisions, and communicating what it means for model outputs as something planners and policymakers can act on.

I also presented on behalf of Orlando, on using large ensembles to find decision-relevant scenarios in LULCC projections: https://blenback.github.io/presentations/2026_07_15_iemss.html

And with Isabel Nicholson Thomas and Manuel Kurmann I gave a workshop on using Quarto for documentation, manuscripts, slides, websites and dashboards from a single set of plain text sources. The full workshop is freely available and can be followed at your own pace: https://iat-dml.github.io/quarto-workshop/

If sufficient interest emerges, we would like to take the session forward as a collective review or position paper. If you work on uncertainty in land change modelling, I would be glad to hear from you.

#LandUseChange #EnvironmentalModelling #Uncertainty #Quarto #OpenScience