hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
In June 2014, more than 75 Early Career Researchers (ECRs) attended the ECR Workshop 2014, a one-day event held prior to the 4th European Conference on Permafrost (EUCOP) in Évora, Portugal. One of the goals of this workshop was to elaborate future avenues of permafrost research from an ECR perspective during a forum with participants from various disciplines and countries. The outcome of this workshop is a ?Permafrost Priority Sheet?, which will be presented to the International Permafrost Association (IPA) and will contribute to the establishment of research priorities leading up to into the 3rd International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP III) in 2015 in Toyama, Japan. This presentation will highlight some of the results that were obtained during the workshop, in a similar fashion as what will be presented at ICARP III. Additionally, it will focus on the organisation of the forum, the consultation process and the lessons learned from the overall experience. The results from this workshop took the form of research questions, from which five questions were elected by the participants as the most relevant at identifying gaps that need to be addressed in permafrost research. The broad range of topics include, engineering, remote sensing, traditional knowledge, massive ice, permafrost distribution, and more. Overall, these topics underscore the wide variety of specialties of the participants as well as the need for further research across a spectrum of permafrost-related topics. To date, this operation has been a success largely due to the extensive collaboration between the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN), and the ECR organisations of inter-disciplinary projects Changing Permafrost in the Arctic and its Global Effects in the 21st Century (PAGE-21) and Arctic Development and Adaptation to Permafrost in Transition (ADAPT). This workshop was an ECR initiative from the beginning to the end and is a great example of collaboration between National and International organizations. It also shows how ECR projects can be conveyed using existing networks and events in order to broadcast their opinions and increase their contribution to the future of Arctic science.
