The Workshop on Parameter Identification and Inverse Problems in
Hydrology, Geology and Ecology, Karlsruhe, April 10-12, 1995, was
organized to bring to- gether an interdisciplinary group drawn from the
areas of science, engineering and mathematics for the following
purposes: - to promote, encourage and influence more understanding and
cooperation in the community of parameter identifiers from various
disciplines, - to forge unity in diversity by bringing together a
variety of disciplines that attempt to understand the reconstruction of
inner model parameters, un- known nonlinear constitutive relations,
heterogeneous structures inside of geological objects, sources or sinks
from observational data, - to discuss modern regularization tools for
handling improperly posed pro- blems and strategies of incorporating a
priori knowledge from the applied problem into the model and its
treatment. These proceedings contain some of the results of the
workshop, representing a bal- anced selection of contributions from the
various groups of participants. The reviewed invited and contributed
articles are grouped according to the broad headings of hydrology,
non-linear diffusion and soil physics, geophysical methods, mathematical
analysis of inverse and ill-posed problems and parallel algorithms for
inverse problems. Some of the issues adressed by the articles in these
proceedings include the rela- tion between least squares and direct
formulations of inverse problems for partial differential equations,
nonlinear regularization, identification of nonlinear consti- tutive
relations, fast parallel algorithms for large scale inverse problems,
reduction of model structures, geostatistical inversion techniques.
