 Okay. So we're going to start with a presentation from Michael Barton from the, he's going to tell us about the Consys Network. And I'll just turn it right over to you. I'm actually pretty loud, but it doesn't work for webinars if there's no microphone. So it's really wonderful to be opening this meeting this morning. I'm the director of another organization called Consys Network. It's a network for computational modeling and social and ecological sciences. One thing I want to do is thank Jai and Greg for inviting us to cosponsor this unique and interesting meeting today. It's a real honor to be here for us and also very exciting to be able to have this opportunity to share ideas and strategies and hopefully we'll continue a set of collaborations that we've had over the last several years. Consys Network is an organization that in a number of ways is somewhat parallel to systems in the kind of things that we do and the kind of resources we have. But the focus is on social and ecological sciences rather than earth sciences. So it's very complementary in many respects to systems. We're an international scientific network like systems with close to almost 2,000 members, of which of course there's only a much smaller number of really active full members, but coming from all over the world. We have a number of resources available for modeling sciences, including we have a model library where we have over 400 models of social and ecological systems published. You can go there, Waikikama systems, download models that this is one that focuses on hydrology and the social side of water resources. And now we're also we have a center, a facility, Consys Core Center, which is a spoke in the new NSF big data infrastructure network that they set up where we are focusing on developing technology and best practices for open science, especially transparency, reproducibility, and especially reuse of code for scientific computing. And that's one of the topics of Alalee's clinic that'll be tomorrow. And we have another couple of other clinics here, Tatiana Filotovas doing one on agent-based modeling. There's some other clinics coming up. So I want since I get to start, I just want to welcome everybody to this truly interdisciplinary meeting of modeling scientists. And I want to start by saying we need this dynamic duo of modeling Earth and human systems today more than ever before in human history. Up until even a few centuries ago, I mean, I'm a historical scientist like most of you looked at the past. And so a few centuries is a really short time for me up till a few centuries ago, people lived in small communities. Any of us if we lived in one of those communities could observe the social and natural phenomena around us. We could kind of figure out what the consequences of our actions would be for our social world, for the natural world in which we lived. That's not the way it is anymore. Nobody can do that. In just a few short millennia, people have transformed themselves from a normal mammal on this planet, doing normal mammal things, normal mammal biogeography into something that's a unique global phenomena. There's over seven and a half billion people now on the planet. That's more than any other mammal species. And over half of them live in these urban hives we call cities with millions of inhabitants. This is weird. There aren't any other animals that do this, right? Even this is more than termites and ants in most of the ant hills. So we're really unusual in this. Beyond this, we now have in the last few decades digital media, rapid transportation, airplanes, things like this, connecting us all economically, socially, culturally into this planetary, planetary wide network of interactions and information flow. It's a highly complex social natural system of the kite that's unprecedented for any organism in the history of the planet. No other organism has been connected with every other member of its species ever. There are more cell phone subscriptions now in the world than there are people. So this is really unusual. We live in a world that is so complicated now, that's so different from the one that humans lived in for most of our past, that it exceeds our abilities, our very powerful innate abilities to think about, pardon me, complex social and natural dynamics and anticipate the consequences of our decision making. We can't really do that reliably anymore. We can't really do that at all. Oops, darn. Can someone start this again? If I can't do it or maybe I can do it. All right, thanks. On top of it, humans are now a major driver of Earth systems, which is of importance to people here at systems. Over half of the world's terrestrial surface is in pasture and cropland. Over half of the world's forests have been cleared. A lot of the forests that still exist now, including places like the Amazon, were once cleared and have grown back over the recent centuries. Our coastlines are heavily engineered and this includes not just general coastlines, but the effects on deltas and lakes and things like this. Am I having trouble with the mic? Oh, thank you. I do need this. Over half of the surface fresh water that's available is used by people, mostly for agriculture. More nitrogen is cycled by anthropogenic processes than natural processes today. More terrestrial sediment is transported by anthropogenic processes than natural processes today. We live in a truly coupled natural and human planet, but our ability to model these processes that drive our systems, we haven't really caught up with this reality the way we should, given the world that we live in today. This is sort of how we model Earth systems today. We have these various different parts of Earth systems that are supposed to be a button here for us. Yeah, it's there. We have different aspects of Earth systems and we have different models and we look at the relationships between these things. Then we have, there are some human system models that kind of sit over here and sometimes some of the information from Earth systems gets picked up and brought over and put in some of the human system models and some of the information from human system models gets picked up and put in as parameters to Earth system models. Maybe even a little bit of humanity gets injected into some of these Earth system models a little bit. That's the way things work today, but this is more like how the Earth system works. There's just one little piece of it. There is no separate biophysical and human systems. They're all part of the same set of interactions even in a very small area like this one here. Modeling Earth systems without people and modeling people without Earth systems is simply wrong. We're not getting the science right. That means we're missing what's, we're missing our ability to be able to model, simulate and understand the world that we live in and the stakes for getting it wrong, the stakes for getting it right are getting higher and higher today. We live in this world that's dominated by these telecoupled human biophysical processes. What you do here and as you know traveling here has impacts elsewhere in the world and it will have impacts that echo down through time for weeks, months and years and we don't know what they are in many cases. We cannot depend any longer on intuition and simple statistics to try and plot out the future of ourselves at local, regional and planetary scales. We need a new kind of data driven modeling science to help us manage the planet that we have inherited. We've inherited a planet that we have to become planetary managers of this world, whether we want to or not. We're stuck with that reality. We need something that looks more like this in the other picture I showed you where you have these complex interactions between people and biophysical processes that are ongoing constantly. Six years ago, Jai and I began talking about the need for integrative modeling of human and Earth systems. How do we do this? This has led to a series of collaborations over the years that I think have been really fruitful. One of the most important, I think, have been the creation of the Human Dimensions Focus Research Group here at Systems that's headed by a COMSIS-Net board member, Mora Zellner, and Systems and Future Earth representative Mark Montseville, both of whom are here today. We've also had participation by members of COMSIS-Net at some of the meetings, some clinics. We did some agent-based modeling clinics before. The FRG organized, I think, a really important workshop a year ago here in Boulder to start to talk about how we can start to create this integrative modeling environment. We've expanded this to collaborations with Future Earth and other European and global organizations to try and come up with a way forward, strategize on a way forward to create the kind of modeling environment we need. And here we are today invited to cosponsor this meeting. Especially important in these activities has been trying to plan for a next generation modeling environment that can support this kind of integrative simulation of human and Earth systems. There's been a series of meetings in the past 12 months and including at various places in the world, exotic places like San Diego, Kyoto, and Plotsdam in Boulder. And there's a general consensus that's emerged that we need to move beyond discussions. These meetings are great. It's wonderful to talk with everybody. We need to somehow begin to create these environments for integrative modeling of natural and human systems. You all are on the front line of this. You're the ones that are leading this new directions in modeling science. You're creating the tools that we need to understand our planet and begin to manage it at the scale so we need to do. So somehow I think this meeting is a good opportunity for us to think about how we can combine our expertise in simulating biogeochemical, social processes, and the feedbacks between these important processes. There's breakout groups today on modeling couple of human Earth systems. We'll have other kinos, clinics, and breakouts over the next couple of days. So we want to ask you all or challenge you all how can systems, ConsisNet, and other modeling scientists how can we begin to put together, to pool, put together our abilities, our intellectual scientific capacity and our technologies to create a next generation modeling system, the kind that we need to create a more sustainable world. So we need you to discuss ideas, issues, but especially propose goals and solutions and think about what are the next steps. So I'll leave you with that. Thank you very much. Thank you.