Report on IASC TWG at ASSW 2023
Reported by: Masaki UCHIDA (NIPR)
Tetsuya HIYAMA (Nagoya University)
Related research program: Land
The annual meeting of the Terrestrial Working Group (TWG) of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) was held on 19 February 2023 during the Arctic Science Summit Week 2023 (ASSW 2023). The venue was Vienna, Austria, and online attendance was also permitted. Thus, the meeting was conducted in a hybrid form.
The meeting opened with a review of the agenda, after that representatives from each country gave a presentation on self-introduction with national report. Following these, reports on the activities of six projects funded by the TWG were presented. Among them, the Arctic Critical Zone Observation Network held its first workshop in Pisa, Italy, in January 2023. Eighteen participants gave presentations on the results obtained so far. Afterward, scientific questions were identified out, and the variables to be measured were determined. The Arctic vegetation archive project held a workshop in the form of a hybrid in Vienna, Austria, in February 2023. It was reported that vegetation data is now available in TurboVeg2 (https://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/turboveg/ ).
The International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP) develops a research plan for the Arctic every 10 years. As its fourth term begins in 2025, we shared our ideas on what kinds of research are important for the period. The importance of the following issues was noted: Improving knowledge at multiple spatial scales of the current state of Arctic terrestrial geosystems and ecosystems; Determining the net effect of the terrestrial and freshwater environmental and biosphere processes that amplify or moderate climate warming; Developing unifying concepts, fundamental theories, and computer models of the interactions among species, interactions between species and their environment, and the biology of life in extreme environments; Estimating past changes in arctic geo- and biodiversity, measuring current change and predicting future changes.