SvalbardMonitoring-Workshop

ArcticBiomass and SvalbardBiomass were two projects in the period 2013-2018. ArcticBiomass was a Norway-USA network (RCN 227064) project funded by the Research Council of Norway . The main objectives of this project were to establish a joint American-Norwegian research team dealing with research on the combination of field and satellite remote sensing quantification of above-ground plant biomass, vegetation productivity and growing season mapping in northern Alaska and in Svalbard, as well as on a circumpolar scale. The project team consisted of five institutions with eleven researchers in 2013 and was increased to eight institutions in Norway and the USA and four institutions in Europe (Finland, UK and EU-JRC-Italy). A workshop in Svalbard called SvalbardBiomass was arranged in 2017, in which we focused on increased use of existing monitoring sites and UAVs with a reduced environmental footprint in the monitoring in the Arctic and how the project could contribute to establish new scientific cooperations in Svalbard and across the Arctic. An open access journal IOP Environmental Research Letters (ERL) was the main channel and 25 articles were produced in a focus issue. Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). To follow up the results from these two former network projects, we want to arrange new workshops continuing the good works accomplished concerning tundra greening and browning, to increase the thematic topics to include cryosphere and permafrost and further to integrate this into the work of the Svalbard Integrated Observation System (SIOS-SESS-reports) and provide information from the High Arctic Svalbard, low arctic and the northern boreal regjons of Fennoscandia to the NOAA ARC-reports. One workshop will be hybrid while the other will be digital/virtual.