Summer School on bio-geo-dynamics and Earth Sytem Sciences: The biophysical processes that shape the Earth

This School, the BESS,  has a long tradition that goes back to 1990 and was recently renewed.
I usually suggests to my students that participating is an important experience for their formation. The lecturers are very distinguished colleagues. The location (Venice and the Istituto Veneto) are fantastic. The topics are of general interest and, if not strictly covering hydrology, they are certainly useful to open the view of hydrologists who think that hydrology is a little more that fitting some data set but want to understand "how nature works".

The topics of this year were:

• Spatial and temporal controls of soil function by Bridget Emmet
• The thermodynamics of the Earth System by Axel Kleidon
• Linking pattern formation and spatial ecology by Ehud Meron
• Complex Dynamics of Forest Ecosystems at Different Scales: From 100 square meters to the Global Scale by Herman Shugart

Fortunately all the lectures are now available as streaming videos (not the slides of the lectures unfortunately) and can be viewed here.

Work of students is available instead here. Thanks to Marco Marani and Andrea Rinaldo for organising it, and thanks to the Istituto Veneto di Lettere Scienze ed Arti for making all the material available, and for supporting all of it.