The growth and development of the human population depends on our natural environment in many respects. Ecosystem services range from provision of food and fresh water to carbon storage and recreational value. However, human activities also interfere with the natural environment to the point of jeopardizing these ecosystem services. Habitat destruction and degradation lead to loss of biodiversity, changing climate disrupts life cycles, biological invasions incur exorbitant remediation cost.

While the effects of feedbacks between human actions and natural environmental processes are clearly visible in our world, an understanding of their mechanisms is only beginning to emerge. Feedbacks occur on several levels. There are feedbacks within environmental systems, stemming from impacts of several stressors on the same system. These interactions are typically called cumulative effects or cumulative impacts. Evaluating cumulative impacts is required by law in many jurisdictions, but clear guidelines for how to assess these effects are often lacking. Particularly difficult to assess are cumulative effects in spatially distributed systems, for example, multiple point-source disturbances and migration barriers in watersheds.

There are also feedbacks between human activity and environmental systems response. For example, use of pesticides jeopardizes biological populations that are crucial for ecosystems services (e.g. wild bees for pollination) and can impact human health (e.g. through bio-accumulation in the food chain). Identification of these negative effects can lead to social and political action (e.g. social learning, regulation), that in turn affects pesticide use and changes the environment. If significant time delays or multiple stable states exist in the system, then hysteresis effects can arise so that the system may not return to the original state after the stressor is removed. Understanding the mechanisms behind these feedbacks is crucial for informed decision making in environmental management. While many aspects of environmental systems have been modeled successfully in isolation, we now need to combine multiple aspects of and feedbacks between environmental processes, human activities and social learning into mathematical (multi-scale) models and analyse resulting dynamics.

This workshop will bring together researchers from different aspects of human-environment interactions to present recent advances in the field and exchange ideas to chart new research directions. Mathematical aspects of this workshop will include qualitative theory of dynamical systems, multiscale analysis, stochastic and agent-based modelling, game theory and control theory. For example, techniques for optimization and optimal control of agent-based models and some other types of stochastic models are just beginning to be developed. More work on incorporating feedback control and adaptive management in models of invasions and resources is needed. Areas of application include emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides, sustainable natural resource management and ecosystem resilience, control of biological invasions and protection of biodiversity.