Monday, 11 July 2011

• Looks like a busy fall

  Session titles are now available for the IGBP Congress in March 2012 with abstracts due on 19 August 2011.

  It's worth a few minutes of your time to peruse the list of sessions. There should shortly be a session on mountains in that list, but there are already some quite interesting sessions. One that caught my eye was one on tipping points in social networks chaired by Andy Revkin and involving Google and BBC.  Such a session smacks of the real world of politics and perception, a topic that, while recognized as central to our issue, never seems to be explored well enough at these kinds of meetings.

  Session titles are also now available for the AGU Fall meeting in December 2011 where MRI will also host a Key Contacts Workshop. The AGU is truly a phenomenal meeting, one that I promote to all MRI participants, and it usually has some terrific sessions in scientific  topics that you would never find anywhere else (e.g., planetary evolution) and on practical topics such as communicating science to the public, a topic that is particularly important in the current context when science itself is often portrayed as just another interest group.

  The MRI Synthesis Workshop on Urban Growth in High Mountains will the first synthesis workshop under the 2010-2013 NSF Grant to see the light of day. Prakash Tiwari, who originally proposed the workshop, will host 12 researchers from 1 to 5 November 2011 in Nainital, India, a hill station that, according to Prakash, has experienced explosive growth in the past few years, and as such will give the  participants a view of benefits and challenges arising from urbanization that one would not get at, say, Davos or Aspen! Participants will bring experiences from three different parts of the Himalaya, Japan, East Africa, the temperate and tropical Andes, the Alps, the Pyrennes and the Apennines, a good sampling of the socio-economic context of mountain regions around the world. I will participate in the workshop and afterward hope to visit the region around Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, one of the BRs involved in the GLOCHAMORE project and one with quite a history of contention.

   MRI has started a Group on the Mtn.TRIP site for this workshop. I will not give the URL as it is a private group, open only to workshop participants. We created it to see how the Web2.0 tools such as groups can be used to promote preparation and discussion. There are some hurdles to using a Group, hurdles that seem to me to be pretty low (e.g., registering and signing in)  but one shouldn't underestimate the difficulties that many people have in using new technology.  Why am I insisting on a Group? The alternative is to continue use email and documents stored on individual computers, which entails much management of both mailboxs and folders on discs that are in no way coordinated. By running everything through Discussions, wherein the full history of a discussion is visible, and using links to common documents stored on Google docs, it should be much easier to keep track of what's been said and decided.

  I will not be able to participate in the Sonnblick Conference on Climate Change in High Mountain Regions as I must be in, of all places, Iceland, at the third Third Pole Environment workshop (on Tibet and surrounding mountains) promoting the interdisciplinary vision of MRI in the TPE Science Plan. However, Chris Ritter of the MRI Office will participate and will record the presentations, which will certainly be of interest the community. I hope that many of those in the MRI community will be in Salzburg for this event.

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