Moduli spaces of stable maps in genus bigger than zero include many components of different dimensions meeting each other in complicated ways, and the closure of the smooth locus is difficult to describe. We will look at examples of genus one and two maps of low degree in the projective plane to get a feeling of how complicated these spaces can be.
Afterwords, we will sketch the construction of a modular desingularization of the space of genus 2 maps to projective spaces using combinatorial techniques from tropical geometry and maps from certain exotic curve singularities.