Extreme events in agriculture and forestry – Challenges, methods and applications

Extreme events in agriculture and forestry: Challenges, methods and applications

9-11 Jun 2026 Avignon (France)

General workshop description

We propose a three-day interdisciplinary workshop on extreme events in agriculture and forestry at

Avignon University (on the central Hannah Arendt Campus),
from Tuesday June 9th to Thursday June 11th, 2026.

We aim to bring together researchers from the fields of agronomy, climate science, forestry, physics, risk management and statistics. Through a series of invited talks, this workshop addresses challenges, methods and applications related to modeling, simulation and impact assessment of adverse events for plants and harvests, including drought, extreme heat, excessive precipitation, and combinations of such events during the phenological cycle.

The workshop will feature:

Invited and contributed talks.
A short course with practicals on Tuesday morning:
Statistical distribution models for extreme events – Why and how to use them?
Breakout sessions on Thursday morning.

This event is organized by the target project CLIMATHS of the French national research priority project Maths VivES, in collaboration with the Chair of Geolearning, the Chair CARE and the project LOST OXIGEN of INRAE's CLIMAE metaprogramme.

Focus topics:

AI methods for impact assessment in agriculture and forestry
Climate indicators
Compound events and risks
Extreme value theory
Heatwaves and droughts
Interactions between biotic and abiotic stresses
Models for the phenology and ecophysiology of plants
Physical processes and climate dynamics
Rare-event algorithms
Stochastic weather generators for impact assessment

Confirmed speakers

(To be completed)

Denis Allard (BioSP–INRAE)
Maël Aubry (Agroclim–INRAE)
Freddy Bouchet (LMD–IPSL)
Gloria Buritica (MIA Paris Saclay, AgroParisTech)
Dim Coumou (VU Amsterdam)
Iñaki Garcia de Cortazar Atauri (Agroclim–INRAE)
Christelle Hély (EPHE–PSL, ISEM – University of Montpellier)
Arthur Hrast Essenfelder (European Commission Joint Research Centre)
Jessica Keune* (ECMWF)
Marie Launay (Agroclim–INRAE)
Olivier Lopez (ENSAE Paris)
Yueling Ma (Institute of Bio- and Geosciences – Forschungszentrum Jülich)

(*) to be confirmed

Call for contributions

We welcome the submission of abstracts for contributed talks until March 31st. Submitted abstract will be peer-reviewed and authors will be informed about acceptance by the end of April.

Please provide a title and a short abstract (not more than 300 words) and submit them by the submission form.

Talks should be related to the above focus topics of the workshop.

The systems requires that you register to submit an abstract. Note that it will be possible to cancel your registration later if your abstract is not retained.

Short course description

We propose a short course with practicals on Tuesday morning (approximately 9h00-12h00):

Statistical distribution models for extreme events – Why and how to use them ?

This short course will give a gentle introduction to the theoretical foundation and statistical estimation in univariate statistical extreme-value analysis: Generalized Extreme-Value distributions for maxima, Generalized Pareto distributions for threshold exceedances, clustered extreme events, and more recent approaches such as Extended Generalized Pareto distributions. The statistical implementation will be illustrated on climate series data using specialized R packages in the practical sessions.

Instructors: Viviana Carcaiso (Lead), Thomas Opitz. Tbc.

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