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We are pleased to announce that Korea Polar Research Institute will hold the 22nd International Symposium on Polar Sciences in Incheon, the Republic of Korea on May 10-11, 2016 and that registration for the symposium has opened.

The 2016 International Symposium on Polar Sciences is organized in an effort to understand the accelerating changes in the Arctic and to reflect on how to prepare for their anticipated impacts, and thus is entitled “The Future of the Arctic: Science and Governance”. We cordially invite our colleagues to share and discuss the current scientific achievements and law and policy based efforts which will help guide future research and observations of the rapidly changing Arctic.

Abstract Submission:
Please submit the abstract at the symposium website no later than March 25th, 2016.

Registration:
Please register at the symposium website no later than April 22nd, 2016.

FOR POLAR EARLY CAREER SCIENTISTS:
KOPRI wished encourage the participation of early career scientists at this symposium. Awards will be presented to the outstanding contributions by young scientists.

EarthCube is a community-driven activity sponsored through a partnership between the NSF Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) and the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) to transform research in the academic geosciences community. EarthCube aims to create a well-connected and facile environment to share data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner, thus accelerating our ability to understand and predict the Earth system.

Achieving EarthCube will require a long-term dialog between NSF and the interested scientific communities to develop cyberinfrastructure that is thoughtfully and systematically built to meet the current and future requirements of geoscientists. New avenues will be supported to gather community requirements and priorities for the elements of EarthCube, and to capture the best technologies to meet these current and future needs. The EarthCube portfolio will consist of interconnected projects and activities that engage the geosciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer science, and associated communities. The portfolio of activities and funding opportunities will evolve over time depending on the status of the EarthCube effort and the scientific and cultural needs of the geosciences community.

This umbrella solicitation for EarthCube allows funding opportunities to be flexible and responsive to emerging needs and collaborative processes. The EarthCube vision and goals do not change over time, and this section of the solicitation will remain constant. Funding opportunities to develop elements of the EarthCube environment will be described in Amendments to this solicitation. Amendments will appear in the Program Description section of the solicitation and will include details on the parameters, scope, conditions, and requirements of the proposal call. Researchers who receive alerts related to solicitation releases will receive notification when the EarthCube solicitation is updated with an Amendment.

Fairbanks workshop aims to explore recent advances and innovations in indigenous science and scholarship in the circumpolar north and its neighbors. The workshop will bring together indigenous experts and researchers from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds to explore the role and contributions of indigenous frameworks and knowledge systems in advancing fields of science and informing global solutions. The workshop will explore indigenous science as relational, holistic, and multidimensional, taking into account impacts of the social and cultural environment on physical, material, and human processes. The workshop seeks to move the academic discourse beyond exploring intersections of indigenous knowledge and science to explore indigenous knowledge and practice as a framework of science. Additionally, participants will explore how knowledge produced within indigenous systems has the potential to contribute to community adaptation and resilience within multiple global contexts and settings. The workshop will also highlight innovative, community-driven, and decolonizing methodologies that demonstrate how indigenous frameworks can shape both knowledge and practice within social science research.

Presenter:
Todd Brinkman, Assistant Professor of Wildlife Ecology, University of Alaska Fairbanks and NASA_ABoVE Project Lead

Todd will present research that explores how climate-driven changes in the environment have influenced hunter-wildlife interactions across Alaska. Based on findings, he has concluded that recent environmental changes have challenged common hunting practices primarily by disrupting access to harvest areas. Todd suggests that a combination of innovative research, local adaptation, and flexible policies are required to address current and future challenges relating to hunter access to wildlife resources.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) and associated assessment activities are giving increased attention to evaluating risks of climate change (including both likelihoods and anticipated consequences of climate-related events), rather than mainly cataloguing recent and projected future impacts.

At this free workshop, experts in climate change and risk analysis techniques as well as participants in past and current NCA activities will discuss better ways to inform decisions by the variety of decision makers in various regions and sectors of the country. Such decisions include the nature of the risks, interactions of climate trends with other trends in American economy and society, potential impacts on the Nation’s key human and natural systems, and implications of their choices for reducing risks.

The workshop will be held at the NAS building at 2101 Constitution Ave, NW, Washington, DC.

Follow the link above and register today to join by webcast or in person.

Humanity is reliant upon the physical resources and natural systems of the Earth for the provision of food, energy, and water. It is becoming imperative that we determine how society can best integrate across the natural and built environments to provide for a growing demand for food, water and energy while maintaining appropriate ecosystem services. Factors contributing to stresses in the food, energy, and water (FEW) systems include increasing regional and social pressures and governance issues as result of land use change, climate variability, and heterogeneous resource distribution. These interconnections and interdependencies associated with the food, energy and water nexus create research grand challenges in understanding how the complex, coupled processes of society and the environment function now, and in the future. There is a critical need for research that enables new means of adapting to future challenges. The FEW systems must be defined broadly, incorporating physical processes (such as built infrastructure and new technologies for more efficient resource utilization), natural processes (such as biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles), biological processes (such as agroecosystem structure and productivity), social/behavioral processes (such as decision making and governance), and cyber elements. Investigations of these complex systems may produce discoveries that cannot emerge from research on food or energy or water systems alone. It is the synergy among these components in the context of sustainability that will open innovative science and engineering pathways to produce new knowledge and novel technologies to solve the challenges of scarcity and variability.

The overarching goal of INFEWS is to catalyze the well-integrated interdisciplinary research efforts to transform scientific understanding of the FEW nexus in order to improve system function and management, address system stress, increase resilience, and ensure sustainability. The NSF INFEWS initiative is designed specifically to attain the following goals:

1. Significantly advance our understanding of the food-energy-water system through quantitative and computational modeling, including support for relevant cyberinfrastructure;

2. Develop real-time, cyber-enabled interfaces that improve understanding of the behavior of FEW systems and increase decision support capability;

3. Enable research that will lead to innovative system and technological solutions to critical FEW problems; and

4. Grow the scientific workforce capable of studying and managing the FEW system, through education and other professional development opportunities.

This activity enables interagency cooperation on one of the most pressing problems of the millennium - understanding interactions across the food, energy and water nexus - how it is likely to affect our world, and how we can proactively plan for its consequences. It allows the partner agencies - National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA/NIFA) and others - to combine resources to identify and fund the most meritorious and highest-impact projects that support their respective missions, while eliminating duplication of effort and fostering collaboration between agencies and the investigators they support.

NSF and USDA/NIFA are interested in promoting international cooperation that links scientists and engineers from a range of disciplines and organizations to solve the significant global challenges at the nexus of food, energy and water systems. Proposals including international collaboration are encouraged when those efforts enhance the merit of the proposed work by incorporating unique resources, expertise, facilities or sites of international partners. The U.S. team’s international counterparts generally should have support or obtain funding through other non-NSF sources.

The Sea Ice Prediction Network (SIPN) announces an open webinar entitled "Challenges and Best Practices: Sea Ice Thickness Distribution as a Rosetta Stone for Cross-Scale Communication."

This webinar will be presented by Cathleen Geiger, University of
Delaware and is scheduled for Tuesday, 22 March 2016 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. AKDT.

This event is designed for the sea ice research community and others interested in learning about issues related to estimating sea ice thickness across many scales. While this is an open event, attendees should be aware that the discussions will largely be of a technical nature.

Sea ice is a unique geophysical material capable of spanning a large range of horizontal length scales while at the same time only varying by meters in vertical extent. As example, a sea ice crack can be less than a meter-wide in one horizontal direction and stretch across the Arctic basin (thousands of kilometers) in the other direction.

This presentation will include discussion on the consistency of sea ice thickness distributions across different horizontal length scales, specifically the issue of measurement accuracy and some of the challenges related to estimating sea ice thickness across many length scales; offer insight into the general phenomenon of "up-scaling" by considering scaling relationships as a form of communication, specifically the communication of information between scales; and some
new best practices illustrated with a simple heuristic model and some small case studies.

The webinar is scheduled for 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. AKDT (10:00 a.m.to 11:00 a.m. PDT, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. MDT, 12:00-1:00 p.m. CDT, and 1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT) on Tuesday, 22 March 2016.

More details including registration instructions, will be announced closer to the event. The webinar will be archived and available online after the event.

Please contact me with any questions at betsy [at] arcus.org.

Warm regards,
Betsy

Betsy Turner-Bogren
Project Manager
Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS)
3535 College Road Suite 101
Fairbanks, AK 99709-3710
Phone: 907/474-1600
betsy [at] arcus.org

The University of the Arctic announces a call for scientific abstracts for the first ever UArctic Congress. The meeting will take place from 13-16 September 2016 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

We now invite abstracts for the following science themes:

• Vulnerability of Arctic Environments;
• Vulnerability of Arctic Societies;
• Local and Traditional Knowledge;
• Building Long-Term Human Capacity; and
• New Markets for the Arctic, Including Trade, Tourism and Transportation.

Abstract submission deadline: 21 March 2016.

The 12th annual Polar Technology Conference (PTC) will be hosted by Polar Field Services and CH2MHILL Polar Services at the Polar Field Service (PFS) headquarters in Littleton, Colorado.

The primary purpose of this conference is to bring together Polar Scientists and Technology Developers in a forum to exchange information on research system operational needs and technology solutions that have been successful in polar environments. This exchange of knowledge helps to address issues of design, implementation, and deployment for systems that are to achieve their research goals in the Polar Regions.

Past participants have come from the private sector, state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Presentations generally cover system requirements for proposed research along with descriptions of systems and approaches that have been proven in polar deployments. Typical hardware and software topics have included weather stations, robotics, power systems, telemetry, and remote communications. The scale of systems ranges from the autonomous data collection towers to large scale research stations. Polar venues represented include under, on, and above the ice, tundra, or sea.

Discussions on intra- and inter-national cooperation in site deployment and maintenance are encouraged. Informal breaks allow for opportunities for networking and information exchange. A poster session is also included. Workshops have been held offering tutorial exchanges on specific technologies (e.g., power systems, Iridium). We are pleased to have support from the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs as an endorsement of the concept of bringing together providers and consumers of these technologies in hopes of benefiting from that synergy.

For more information and to register, please see the above link.

Location: University of Alaska Fairbanks, North Campus Area
Time: 10:00 am-12:00 pm AKDT

Polar Educators International (PEI) announces the first-ever Spring Equinox 5K Run/Walk. The event will take place in conjunction with the Arctic Science Summit Week and Arctic Observing Summit meetings in Fairbanks, Alaska, on 19 March 2016 at the UAF North Campus area.

The race course will include roads and trails on the UAF campus, with views of the Alaska Range, a chance to explore the natural areas of the UAF campus, and some well-deserved time outside after a week of meetings. This event is open to all ages and prizes will be awarded to top finishers.

Registration for the event is $20.00 and is available at Beaver Sports in Fairbanks (3480 College Road) and at the UAF Wood Center. The entry fee will be used to support Polar Educators International.

Those not attending ASSW can join the PEI 5K virtually, at:
http://polareducator.org/news/pei/165-2016-polar-run