In June 2014 CliC supported the Permafrost Young Researchers Workshop 2014 (www.eucop4.org/permafrost-young- researchers-workshop.html), which was held in conjunction with the Fourth European Conference on Permafrost 2014 in Evora, Portugal (www.eucop4.org). This workshop involved about 100 early career permafrost scientists and engineers. The major focus of the workshop was to determine future avenues of permafrost research from a young researchers‘ perspective. This activity was mentored by the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), who is leading the process towards ICARP III (3rd International Conference on Arctic Research Planning), and the International Permafrost Association (IPA) together with CliC, both coordinating permafrost activities within ICARP III.
An online questionnaire was set up prior to the workshop and was made available to all Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN) and Association of Polar Early Career Scientist (APECS) members (ca. 5,000) including the young researchers from the currently largest permafrost projects worldwide; i.e. PAGE21 and ADAPT. All answers were compiled and grouped according to research topics that had been distributed before the on-site activity, which was conducted in the format of a World Café. More than a dozen small moving groups worked on the predefined research questions in an iterative process of discussing, reformulating and narrowing these questions. In the end, a voting system with a predefined hierarchy allowed all participants to synthesize the most important future issues in permafrost research. The outcome will be a young researcher contribution to IASC and to the CliC-IPA activities for ICARP III in particular to PRP, which is the “Permafrost Research Priorities”. Permafrost Priority Sheets will summarize the discussions from the forum. This Priority Sheet will be a short document, which will also contribute to an assessment of research priorities from an early career researcher perspective piloted by the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS). It will feed into the final ICARP III meeting in Toyama, Japan in April 2015, together with contributions from other initiatives (e.g. Arctic in Rapid Transition).
CliC awarded 16 travel grants with a total value of by 7,900 EUR. Selected through a peer-reviewed process, the award recipients came from Canada, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. All kinds of educational levels were present with undergraduate students, master students, PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and lecturers. All funded workshop participants created a FrostByte – a short video to present their research. The production of the approximately 90 FrostBytes was strongly supported by CliC, which also hosts the FrostBytes on its website (http://www.climate-cryosphere.org/categories/138-frostbytes).
This event was jointly organized by PYRN, PAGE21, ADAPT, APECS. The full report can be downloaded here.