The BESTMAP project made a stop at the 9th European Conference on Ecological Modelling (ECEM 2023), a dynamic gathering held between 4-8 September in Leipzig, Germany. The conference attracted an impressive assembly of nearly 350 participants from across Europe, all converging to explore a range of topics central to ecological modeling. These discussions spanned a wide spectrum, encompassing areas such as the representation of response mechanisms, multi-criteria model evaluation, model-data fusion, sensitivity and robustness analyses, upscaling and transferability to new regions, linkages to management scenarios, social-ecological systems, transparency and reproducibility, as well as the implementation and testing of theories and concepts, and the synthesis of multi-modelling approaches.

During the conference, Stephanie Roilo of the Dresden University of Technology and a member of the BESTMAP consortium, gave a presentation as part of the session titled "Environmental modelling for policy support-how to build bridges between two worlds." Stephanie's presentation "A comparison of agri-environment measures’ contributions to habitat suitability for farmland birds across regions, species, and model algorithms," highlighted some of the most prominent BESTMAP results and showcased the recently-developed Case Study policy briefs, which look into the different policy needs and recommendations within each of the project case study areas.