Report on IASC TWG at ASSW 2022
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 27 March 2022 during the Arctic Science Summit Week 2022 (ASSW 2022). The venue was Tromsø, Norway, but online attendance was also permitted, so the meeting was held as a hybrid.
The meeting opened with a review of the agenda, after which representatives from each country gave a presentation on their self-introduction with national reports. Following these, reports on the activities of five projects funded by the TWG were presented. The herbivore network project conducted its online meeting in autumn 2021. The project is seeking collaborators for a degradation experiment using reference materials to determine the impact of herbivores on organic matter degradation across the Arctic. The Arctic vegetation archive project rescheduled its workshop which was originally scheduled to take place in 2021 to be held during the ASSW 2023. In Alaska and Russia, the integration of datasets is in progress. Data for Alaska are now being made available in the Alaska Arctic Geobotanical Atlas, and for Russia in the Russian Arctic Vegetation Archive. As for the T-MOSAiC project, a concurrent circum-Arctic-level study of the land area, a report was given on the project’s achievements to date. The project was an interdisciplinary project involving collaboration between a wide range of academic disciplines. Since the project had achieved significant results, the continuation of the project is under consideration.
The TWG compiles a future work plan every five years, and the participants discussed ideas for the following work plan starting in autumn 2022. At the beginning, four themes were identified: 1. Abiotic/biotic linkages and feedbacks, 2. Rapid changes and life at the extremes, 3. Social-ecological systems and development, and 4. Advancing TWG aims and deliverables. Ideas were freely exchanged, and about 15 ideas were put forward. The ideas included awareness of co-benefits and knowledge co-production between Arctic residents and Arctic scientists.