HOLIVAR2006 Abstracts
PAGES (Past Global Changes).
Thorsten Kiefer1, Christoph Kull1, Leah Christen1 and Julie Brigham-Grette2
1PAGES IPO, Sulgeneckstrasse 38, 3007 Bern, Switzerland
2Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-5820, USA
Contact: Thorsten Kiefer (kiefer@pages.unibe.ch) or Julie Brigham-Grette (juliebg@geo.umass.edu)
Background
PAGES is the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) core project charged with co-ordinating the scientific community concerned with, a) developing a quantitative understanding of the Earth's past environment and b) defining the envelope of natural environmental variability alongside which anthropogenic impacts can be assessed.
The primary objective of PAGES is to facilitate international collaboration and interdisciplinary science. The emphasis of PAGES interest is on the entire spectrum of high-resolution studies of past global change that can be used to improve model projections of the future. PAGES activities are not restricted to IGBP, but offer substantial synergy with other programs; e.g. WCRP (World Climate Research Programme).
Activities, Services and Products
PAGES activities include organising international workshops and conferences, producing scientific publications, informing scientists and stakeholders of new trends in paleoscience via the PAGES newsletter and website, maintaining a database of paleoenvironmental researchers and PAGES products, supporting capacity-building efforts, and helping to create an integrated paleo-community.
Services provided by PAGES include:
Website: PAGES website (www.pages-igbp.org) offers a variety of services, including a calendar listing upcoming paleo-meetings and workshops, a jobs page, and a data page to facilitate public access to paleo-data, as well as 'National PAGES' web pages providing contacts and links to paleoresearch within individual countries.
Databases: The PAGES People Database offers an online searchable directory of over 3700 scientists and institutions worldwide working within the PAGES area of interest (www.pages-igbp.org/people). The PAGES Product Database provides a searchable list of PAGES-related photos, posters, reports, journal issues, and books (www.pages-igbp.org/products). The majority of these products are available to download or in hardcopy form free of charge.
PAGES News: The PAGES newsletter communicates research results, upcoming events and workshop reports. PAGES News is produced three times a year with a circulation of 3400 and is available in digital or hardcopy form.
Workshops: Through the support of its funders, PAGES provides workshop funding to PAGES initiatives and to organisers of international meetings wishing to invite scientists from developing countries to participate.
Synthesis Publications: As a follow-up to PAGES workshops, research activities, or community-driven efforts, PAGES supports the publication of special journal issues, books, and reports by editing the scientific contributions and guiding them through the publication process.
Visiting Scientists: The IPO is equipped with a small guest scientist office. This allows PAGES to integrate scientists from all over the world in PAGES activities for a period of several days to several months.
Future Scientific Focus
PAGES recently outlined a revised scientific structure involving four new thematic Foci and four Cross-Cutting Themes that are of fundamental relevance to all the Foci and to paleoscience in general. Several old program elements will be incorporated within the revised structure. The activities taking place under each organisational group will rely on the initiative and active participation of the paleoscience community.
Thematic Foci
Focus 1: Past Climate Forcings fosters activities that aim to produce improved, extended, and consistent time series of climate forcing parameters, both natural and human-made, including solar insolation and irradiance intensity (or luminosity), volcanic activity, land use, greenhouse gas, and aerosol concentrations.
Focus 2: Reconstruction and Modeling of Regional Climates and Modes of Variability aims for a better understanding of past climate dynamics (climate modes, low-to-high latitude and longitudinal linkages, global teleconnections) by comparison of reconstructions and model simulations. Activities under this Focus contribute towards a global coverage of high-resolution, well-dated reconstructions of past climate-state parameters (temperature, precipitation, atmospheric pressure fields) and of past modes of climate variability, based on natural archives and documentary data.
Focus 3: Land/Ocean/Cryosphere Dynamics and Linkages hosts activities that reconstruct and model abrupt changes, and attempt to quantify associated thresholds. Targets of primary interest include ocean circulation changes, droughts, ice sheet stability, land surface processes, monsoon dynamics, and permafrost changes.
Focus 4: Past Human-Climate-Environment Interactions addresses the long-term interactions between past climate, other environmental processes, and human activities. Emphasis lies in comparing regional-scale reconstructions of environmental and climatic processes, from natural archives, documentary and instrumental data, with evidence on past human activity, from historical and archeological records. This Focus further promotes dynamic modeling to better understand processes of climate-human-environment interaction.
Cross-Cutting Themes
Theme 1: Chronostratigraphy underlies most paleoscientific research and often limits the strength of conclusions based on paleoenvironmental reconstructions. This Theme encourages activities that improve tools for absolute and relative dating, and encourage reference time scales and creative new approaches.
Theme 2: Proxy Development, Validation, and Calibration supports improvement of the precision and accuracy of paleoenvironmental proxies as a basis for high-quality records of past global change that are able to complement instrumental and documentary data. Activities include efforts on proxy interpretation and development, analytical innovation, inter-laboratory comparisons, and calibration refinement.
Theme 3: Data Management provides an umbrella for activities that support availability and access to paleoscience data, as well as creative ways for their scientifically fruitful utilisation. This Theme aims to mediate between the scientific community and international data centers and regional, topical, and national databases.
Theme 4: Dissemination and Outreach aims to ensure that paleoscience objectives and results are disseminated within the paleoscience and to the wider global change communities, and that content is readily available for educational purposes, and communicated to the educated public.