Two new reports on activities carried on within the IASC Terrestrial Working Group are now available on IASC website. Read and learn more about the An Arctic Vegetation Archive (AVA) and the Circum-polar Arctic Flux Workshop!
An Arctic Vegetation Archive (AVA)
When: March 2017 | Where: Prague (Czech Republic)
An Arctic Vegetation Archive (AVA) is needed to develop an effective Arctic terrestrial monitoring program and provide a standardized vegetation framework and data for an Arctic Vegetation Classification (AVC), land-cover mapping, ecological experiments, modeling, and biodiversity studies. Insufficient and non-standardized Arctic vegetation plot data are available to accomplish this task. The recently launched AVA and AVC aim to fill this knowledge gap.
The AVA and AVC would cover the entire Arctic tundra biome, the first for any of the world’s major biomes. This is achievable because the Arctic is the only biome that has its entire list of known vascular plants, mosses and lichens documented in up-to-date flora checklists developed by taxonomists within the CAFF Flora Group. Also the amount of vegetation plot data from the Arctic is still relatively modest compared to other biomes (approximately 31,000 plots). A large body of international experience and collaboration with database experts in other regions will also help to make the Arctic task feasible.
contact:
Skip Walker
dawalker@alaska.edu
Workshop Report
Circum-polar Arctic Flux Workshop
When: February 2017 | Where: Hyytiala (Finland)
Detailed observations of energetic, hydrological and chemical fluxes at the surface-atmosphere interface are necessary to understand and model coupling within the Arctic climate system. Global and regional models may represent Arctic state variables with relative accuracy, but it has been observed that they consistently fail to represent the observed magnitude and direction of energetic fluxes within the Arctic system. Some results of this failure are highly uncertain projections about the future state of the Arctic cryosphere and biosphere and high uncertainty about the fate of cryospheric carbon in the global atmosphere.
contact:
Eugenie Euskirchen and Sandy Starkweather
seeuskirchen@alaska.edusandy.starkweather@noaa.gov
Workshop Report