Research, especially for early career scientists, starts with the spark of an idea and is then often challenged by empirical or methodological road bumps and seemingly dead ends. A diverse range of challenges face those in earth science research, particularly for early career scientists (ECS). Challenges include (1) access difficulties, whether for field sites, equipment or data, (2) problems of scaling and extrapolation and (3) a lack of methodological understanding or knowledge. In this short course, we will raise engaging discussions, which aim to solve challenges, suggest new research approaches and methods, and encourage networks and possibilities for in-depth discussions amongst early career scientists at international conferences.

This short course will start with 2 minute ‘pop-up’ presentations outlining the questions or challenges submitted by attendees. These pop-ups are followed by chaired group discussions in which short course participants engage to crowd solve the presented challenges. To wrap up the session, solutions and suggestions from each topical group are presented to the whole session in a final discussion. A summary on last years’ crowd solving efforts can be found in the EGU GM blog post https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/gm/2018/04/25/diving-under-the-scientific-iceberg/.

This short course lives by your input: i) by stating a research idea or challenge you would like to share, and ii) by participating in the discussion during the short course. To organize and prepare the discussions, please send a short statement of your idea or challenge related to geomorphic research, and your motivation for solving it (3-4 sentences) to geomorph-problems@geographie.uni-bonn.de, by March 1, 2019. The contributions within the short course are free of charge. If you want to discuss a specific problem, but rather stay anonymous, please let us know. We are all early career scientists and expect a non-hierarchic, respectful and constructive environment for the discussions, which will hopefully go some way to identifying and engaging with problems which face ECS geomorphologists.

Session organizers: Anne Voigtländer, Johannes Buckel, Eleanore Heasley, Felix Nieberding, Liseth Perez, Anna Schoch, Harry Sanders, Richard Mason,...