Prof. Friedrich Recknagel from the University of Adelaide, Australia, visited IHB from July 16 to 17, 2024. (Credit: IHB)

From July 16 to 17, 2024, Prof. Friedrich Recknagel from the University of Adelaide, Australia, was invited to the Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to engage in academic exchange. He delivered a lecture titled "Explanatory and Predictive Modelling of Cyanobacterial Bloom by Evolutionary Algorithms," as part of IHB's 16th Innovation Lecture Series in 2024.

In his lecture, Prof. Recknagel provided a comprehensive overview of the development of models for predicting cyanobacterial blooms, covering mechanistic models, neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms. He focused particularly on the principles of Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms (HEA), discussing parameter settings and potential use cases.

Through case studies of bloom prediction in various water bodies, Recknagel systematically analyzed the predictive power and interpretability of the HEA model, emphasizing the critical importance of high-quality monitoring data and limnological knowledge in constructing accurate cyanobacterial bloom prediction models.

Prof. Friedrich Recknagel earned his PhD from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany and is currently a professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Adelaide. His research interests span watershed ecology and ecological informatics. He has served as president of the International Society of Ecological Informatics and was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Ecological Informatics. His ecological models, including SALMO and HEA, have been applied to lake management worldwide.