Five years ago, the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) was launched as an interdisciplinary program of internationally-supported Earth science research addressing large-scale and long-term manifestations of climate, environmental, and socioeconomic changes (focusing on Northern Eurasia) that affect the rate of global change through atmosphere-biosphere-cryosphere interactions and through strong biogeophysical and biogeochemical couplings (http://neespi.org). The major NEESPI science question is: How do Northern Eurasia's terrestrial ecosystems dynamics interact with and alter the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere of the Earth? NEESPI research team (~560 enlisted scientists from around the world) is positioning itself as an open community that welcomes a broad spectrum of participants and does not restrict its gatherings to the Science team members. Presentations from research groups that were not previously associated with NEESPI but conducting their Earth system studies over Northern Eurasia are especially welcome.
Now that the first group of NEESPI projects has been completed and a second generation of projects is in full swing, it is the time to inspect advances in all areas of NEESPI science. We invite presentations on the biogeochemical cycles in Northern Eurasia, the surface energy budget and water cycle in Northern Eurasia, climate and terrestrial ecosystems interactions in Northern Eurasia (land cover and land use, atmospheric aerosols, soil, and, in particular, permafrost and weather extreme changes that affect and are being affected by climate and ecosystems changes), "human dimension" that includes, in addition to regional impact studies of environmental changes, the feedback studies of societal and land use changes on regional and global environment and climate, and tools to address the Northern Eurasia studies (paleoclimatic reconstructions, present and past field campaigns, remote sensing, and modeling). The particular foci of this year’s Session are on (a) advance in models’ ability to represent processes specific to the high-latitudes, including organic soils, permafrost, wetlands, ice sheet dynamics and/or biogeography and (b) the IPY results related to Northern Eurasia and its coastal zone.
Invited Speakers: Prof. Alexander Baklanov (alb@dmi.dk), Prof. Martin Heimann (martin.heimann@bgc-jena.mpg.de),
Prof. Boris Belan, Zuev Institute of Atmospheric Optics SB RAS, Tomsk, Russia ((bbd@iao.ru), Dmitry Schepaschenko International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (schepd@iiasa.ac.at), Prof. Evgeny Gordov, Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems SB RAS, Siberian Center for Environmental Research and Training, Tomsk, Russia (gordov@scert.ru), and Dr. Peter J. van Oevelen, International GEWEX Project Office (gewex@gewex.org).