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Adapting the management of forest resources to climate change involves addressing several crucial aspects to provide a valid basis for decision making. These include the knowledge and belief of decision makers, the mapping of management options for the current as well as anticipated future bioclimatic and socioeconomic conditions, and the ways decisions are evaluated and made. We investigate the adaptive management process and develop a framework including these three aspects, thus providing a structured way to analyze the challenges and opportunities of managing forests in the face of climate change. We apply the framework for a range of case studies that differ in the way climate and its impacts are projected to change, the available management options, and how decision makers develop, update, and use their beliefs about climate change scenarios to select among adaptation options, each being optimal for a certain climate change scenario. We describe four stylized types of decision-making processes that differ in how they (1) take into account uncertainty and new information on the state and development of the climate and (2) evaluate alternative management decisions: the "no-change," the "reactive," the "trend-adaptive," and the "forward-looking adaptive" decision-making types. Accordingly, we evaluate the experiences with alternative management strategies and recent publications on using Bayesian optimization methods that account for different simulated learning schemes based on varying knowledge, belief, and information. Finally, our proposed framework for identifying adaptation strategies provides solutions for enhancing forest structure and diversity, biomass and timber production, and reducing climate change-induced damages. They are spatially heterogeneous, reflecting the diversity in growing conditions and socioeconomic settings within Europe. ; This work was supported by the Seventh Framework Program of the EC Grant Agreement No. 226544. We thank the MINECO "Ramón y Cajal" (Ref. RYC-2013-14262) for funding the research contract of JGG. KK was funded by the project Resilient Forests (KB-29-009-003) of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. BJT and JBJ acknowledge support from the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF Grant No 96). This research has received also funding from the European Union's H2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 691149 (SuFoRun).

"Adaptive survey designs (ASDs) provide a framework for data-driven tailoring of data collection procedures to different sample members, often for cost and bias reduction. People vary in how likely they are to respond and in how they respond. This variation leads to opportunities to selectively deploy design features in order to control both nonresponse and measurement errors. ASD aims at the optimal matching of design features and the characteristics of respondents given the survey budget. Such a goal is sensible, but ASD requires investment in more advanced technical systems and management infrastructure and asks for the collection of relevant auxiliary data. So what are current best practices in ASD? And is ASD worthwhile when the same auxiliary data are employed in the estimation afterwards? In this book, the authors provide answers to these questions, and much more."--Provided by publisher.

Management experts agree that business environments around the world are likely to become more volatile, uncertain and complex in coming years. New Zealand organisations are no exception. Sudden market shifts, turmoil in international politics, rapid technological advances, and climate change all combine to create a turbulent and unpredictable business environment. This booklet gives findings from a major, three-year study of New Zealand organisations that have had to cope with major change. It presents a framework for the future that can help your organisation to adapt, survive, and thrive in turbulent environments.

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the world we knew changed significantly. The buying behavior shifted as well and is reflected by a growing transition to online interaction, higher media consumption and massive turn to online shopping. Companies that aim to remain top of mind to customers should ensure that their way of interacting with user is both relevant and highly adaptive. Companies should invest in state-of-the-art technologies that help manage and optimize the relationship with the client based on both online and offline data. One of the most popular applications that companies use to develop the client relationship is a Recommender System. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation as a static procedure and focus either on a specific type of recommendation or on some limited data. In this paper, it is proposed a novel Reinforcement Learning-based recommender system that has an integrative view over data and recommendation landscape, as well as it is highly adaptive to changes in customer behavior, the Holistic Adaptive Recommender System (HARS). From system design to detailed activities, it was attempted to present a comprehensive way of designing and developing a HARS system for an e-commerce company use-case as well as giving a suite of metrics that could be used for its evaluation.

OBJECTIVES: To explore how actors connect in a system aiming at promoting the establishment of a midwifery profession in Nepal. METHODS: A qualitative explorative study based on the framework of Complex Adaptive Systems. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 key people representing eight different organisations (actors) promoting the development of the midwifery profession. RESULTS: The actors' connections can be described with a complex set of facilitators for and barriers to promoting the establishment of a midwifery profession. The identified facilitators for this establishment in Nepal are (1) a common goal and (2) a desire to collaborate, whilst the barriers are (1) different political interests and priorities, (2) competing interests of the nursing profession and societal views, (3) divergent academic opinions on a midwifery profession, and (4) insufficient communication. The results also showed that Nepalese society cannot distinguish between nursing and midwifery and that the public support for a midwifery profession was hence minimal. CONCLUSION: The move of midwifery from an occupation to a profession in Nepal is an on-going, challenging process. The study indicates the importance of understanding the motivations of, and barriers perceived by, actors that can promote or obstruct the establishment of the midwifery profession. It also points to the importance of informing the wider public about the role and responsibility of an autonomous midwifery profession.

The end states reached by an engineered system during an accident scenario depend not only on the sequences of the events composing the scenario, but also on their timing and magnitudes. Including these additional features within an overarching framework can render the analysis infeasible in practical cases, due to the high dimension of the system state‐space and the computational effort correspondingly needed to explore the possible system evolutions in search of the interesting (and very rare) ones of failure. To tackle this hurdle, in this article we introduce a framework for efficiently probing the space of event sequences of a dynamic system by means of a guided Monte Carlo simulation. Such framework is semi‐automatic and allows embedding the analyst's prior knowledge about the system and his/her objectives of analysis. Specifically, the framework allows adaptively and intelligently allocating the simulation efforts preferably on those sequences leading to outcomes of interest for the objectives of the analysis, e.g., typically those that are more safety‐critical (and/or rare). The emerging diversification in the filling of the state‐space by the preference‐guided exploration allows also the retrieval of critical system features, which can be useful to analysts and designers for taking appropriate means of prevention and mitigation of dangerous and/or unexpected consequences. A dynamic system for gas transmission is considered as a case study to demonstrate the application of the method.

Rationale: Successful implementation of evidence-based innovations has been identified as offering the best outcomes for service users, communities, and organisations. A widening understanding of structures, processes and resources essential to the successful adoption of innovative practices has informed the development of implementation frameworks that seek to bring research users and providers closer together. Despite these efforts, best available research knowledge is still difficult to translate into innovations in practice at scale, requiring the investment and co-ordination of resources across interconnected social structures that can be resistant to change. However, some changes do take hold and lead to new practices becoming integrated into organisational routines. Mobilising individual and collective knowledge have been identified as a key factor in delivering organisational changes. Research in this area has highlighted the role of complex, context dependent and power-laden organizational structures in relation to the spread and use of knowledge while the role of the individual as the agent of change within these organisational structures has received less attention. This study adds empirically to the conceptual and theoretical literature by focusing on the individual as the agent of change and the role of knowledge as a catalyst for the implementation of changes in practice. Drawing on literature on the creation, sharing and use of knowledge and employing the principles of complexity theory to construe the context as a series of complex adaptive systems, the study seeks to gain an understanding of how a Government policy framework transforms into individuals creating, sharing and actioning knowledge to secure changes in practice. Study Context: This study considered how the ambitions of a Scottish Government Policy, Ready to Act (R2A) were implemented within the organisational setting of an NHS Scotland health board. The participants in the study were a group of Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) which included physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech & language therapists, podiatrists and dieticians along with their leaders and representatives from the Scottish Government who had been instrumental in setting the overall direction of service redesign. The R2A policy aimed to break down professional silos to create a more integrated service delivery that focused on early intervention and prevention approaches. The overarching research aim was addressed in this context through the following research questions: What are the underlying mechanisms that enabled individuals to create, share and action knowledge to reconfigure services towards early intervention-prevention service delivery within this context? What underlying mechanisms facilitate and maintain the momentum and direction of change across diverse and dynamic agents within the system? Study Design: The qualitative longitudinal study adopted a realist approach to consider what works for whom and in what context in relation to implementing practice change in line with policy ambitions. Participants' understandings of the change process and their attributions for successful changes were explored over a 17-month period. Context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) theory configurations were constructed and refined through three tranches of focus groups (4) , interviews (23), observations (50 hours) and documentary analysis (16 documents) to provide a robust explanation of how knowledge drawn from a learning activity was mobilised across a complex adaptive system of health and social care. Theoretical Framings Employing concepts from complexity theory and knowledge mobilisation literature, the health and social care context is construed as a complex adaptive system (CAS), where interconnected entities adapt and self-organise in response to stimulus or feedback from their environment. Considering outcomes as an emergent quality of the system rather than a product of command and control, enabled the unpredictable and uncontrollable aspects of the context to be viewed as potential assets to the knowledge mobilisation process. Main Findings: The study considered two workstreams of AHPs who were collaboratively designing changes in practice which aligned with the ambitions of the R2A policy. The groups had different starting points in relation to their workstream tasks. These different starting points, and the resources and histories of the participants had continuing impacts on how the individuals within each workstream group responded to knowledge presented within the learning activity and to the policy ambition of a move to a proactive approach to service provision. Employing a complexity theory lens provided a useful analytical frame for surfacing and explaining differences in the nature and pace of change across contexts. Key constructs from complexity theory (self-organisation, feedback loops, emergence and interconnectivity) provided a useful way of explaining differences across the system and brought attention to elements of the change process which were unforeseen, forgotten or hidden in plain view. The study also identified distributed leadership and the cultivation of an allocentric disposition, where individuals were willing to engage with the knowledge from other groups and individuals, as necessary antecedents of knowledge mobilization. The importance of feedback loops in maintaining the trajectory and momentum of change across the system and over time was another important finding. Feedback loops were observed manifesting as epistemic artefacts which were created, refined and often replaced by individuals and groups as the system adapted and evolved. The longitudinal nature of the study revealed incremental changes which were important, but which were largely unacknowledged by the measures of change adopted by local management and the Scottish Government. Theoretical Contribution: The study revealed how the attributes of complex systems were harnessed to mobilise knowledge and deliver desired outcomes. Drawing together the literature on epistemic artefacts and the attributes of complex adaptive systems, this study provides a greater understanding of the role of artefacts within feedback loops in the sharing and application of knowledge. The nature of feedback loops has not been explored fully in previous studies. This study sheds light on how linguistic, social, and physical artefacts are created and employed within the process of knowledge mobilisation to support sustainable changes in practice. Empirical Contribution: This research provides a rich, detailed account of knowledge mobilisation in AHPs, an under-researched group of key actors within health care. It provides much needed longitudinal empirical evidence to a field which has received predominantly theoretical attention and provides an inter-group observation of knowledge mobilisation within a complex adaptive system. Practical Contribution: Employing realist methodology provided an ontologically deep exploration of the factors impacting on individuals and collectives as they sought to create, share, and implement their knowledge to deliver changes in practice. The realist methodology also provided a reflexive space for participants to review and unpack their experiences and set these within the context of how events emerged across the wider system over time. The refined CMO theories resonated with the experience of stakeholders from a wider national context who identified with the complexity-informed explanations of outcome variation across the system. The refined CMO configurations provide practical guidance on how key factors of complex adaptive system were harnessed to support the development and spread of innovation. Implications of the study The findings from the study suggest that where knowledge is a catalyst for changes in practice, the scale-up and spread of change across a complex adaptive system is facilitated through micro-processes of feedback. These feedback loops are highly sensitive to context. Understanding how feedback loops evolve and influence the trajectory of change within specific contexts offers an opportunity to harness the feedback loop to create virtuous cycles of change, moving the CAS in the desired trajectory of change. Understanding how vicious cycles of undesirable change or status quo are being sustained through feedback loops offers formative opportunities to dampen the influence of these feedback loops. The findings also suggest distributed and hierarchical approaches to leadership are both required within complex organisations. Although command and control structure are necessary to ensure the organisation is stable enough to function effectively, a distributed model of leadership is necessary to foster engagement and innovation. These different forms of leadership were not in competition but could be construed as operating as further feedback loops which influenced the direction of change. Creating change across this complex system relied on the mobilisation of knowledge between engaged agents. This occurred within this study through respectful and empowering relationships which were based on a model of distributed leadership and an allocentric disposition. These factors took time to become established. Individuals and groups working to mobilise knowledge were supported when anticipated timeframes for projects and activities were extended to facilitate change processes, particularly in context where individuals and groups had no history of working together. This study sought to provide a coherent explanation of the events experienced by practitioners and leaders as they addressed the shared ambitions of a government policy. The findings suggest that feedback loops which emerge from a deep understanding of how relationships are formed, managed and sustained across a system, provide key knowledge that can be mobilised to promotes the scale up and spread of innovation across a complex system. ; "This study was supported through the Scottish Improvement Science and Collaborating Centre (SISCC) and The Health Foundation. It forms part of a portfolio of work on Knowledge into Action at Scale (KiAAS)." -- Funding