Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This first session focuses on 'Water on earth: Why so little? Why so much?' and 'Earth's history of changing sea level', followed by the workshop 'Intense rainfall in the Mediterranean area – part 1'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This second session focuses on 'Floods and Heritage of natural mineral water', followed by the workshop 'Intense rainfall in the Mediterranean area – part 2'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This third session focuses on 'MOSAIC Observatory studying arctic climate' and 'Microplastics in rivers', followed by the workshop 'Hands on Water Earthlearningideas – part 1'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This fourth session focuses on 'Water, drought and resilience in the Mediterranean and Water, lightning' and 'atmospheric electricity', followed by the workshop 'Hands on Water Earthlearningideas – part 2'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This fifth session focuses on 'How the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) works' and 'The global carbon cycle', followed by the workshop 'Classroom material using the IMAGGEO photo database'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Our Geoscience Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop will run virtually as vGIFT in a series of six half-day sessions between 19–29 April. This sixth session focuses on 'Water in the solar system' and 'Search for liquid water on Mars', followed by the workshop ' Earth science out of doors'. It starts with a short introduction, has two 30-minute and one 15-minute presentation, followed by an hour-long 'hands on' workshop and a 45-minute long 'networking event'. Further information is given at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/70/geosciences-information-for-teachers-virtual-workshop-vgift-2021/

Well-designed experiments, measurement and modelling approaches are crucial methodologies in Soil Science, Geomorphology and Hydrology.

Depending on the specific research topic, a great variety of tempo-spatial scales is addressed. From raindrop impact and dust emission on field scale to the shaping of landscapes.

This virtual PICO-Session presents experiments, measurements and modelling approaches in the laboratory and the field investigating processes and quantities of soil detachment by wind, splash erosion and subsurface particle transport highlighting the role of vegetation, land use and harmonisation of experiments.

Drafting your first grant proposal can be daunting. Grant writing improves with experience, so how do early career scientists compete on equal footing with those who are more established? In this short course, a panel of scientists and funding agencies will share their experience on applying to different funding bodies and provide top tips to early career scientists. You can gain insight and (even better) inspiration by discussing with the panel the bits and pieces you may struggle with when writing a strong grant proposal. This session will be followed by a ‘pop-up’ session in the Networking and ECS lounge, for more specific questions to our panel.
NOTE - this course has a broader scope than the more specific ERC and Marie Curie short courses. This course gives broad tips and hints on how to write a successful proposal irrespective of the funding body.

Climate change (CC) is the greatest threat to humanity and to Earth’s biodiversity, and affects every single living being and every ecological niche, with poorer communities suffering disproportionately. Many geosciences are thus directly confronted by CC. Geoethics provides an ethical framework to address such challenges to a sustainable future.

However, relatively little is being done to provide opportunities to help people round the world to learn about the changes that are affecting their and their offspring’s lives. The more people are knowledgeable about the changes affecting their lives, the more they will be able to make informed decisions and to adapt and mitigate. In the wake of the 2020 EGU Declaration of the Significance of Geoscience, it is clear that Climate Literacy/Learning (CL) is an imperative that needs to be addressed massively and urgently, both within and beyond the EGU. Geosciences and geoethics can play a significant role in furthering CL.

CL has developed in recent years. Areas of improvement include school curricular, teacher training, educational games, citizen initiatives and EGU sessions, such as the pioneering 2018 and 2019 Climate Change Education sessions. However, much work still needs to be done, for example, to make CL an essential component in all subjects, and at all levels throughout the education system. The aims of such CL might include encouraging an intergenerational outlook, developing a sense of the geoethical dimensions of CC, understanding the complexities and finding solutions acceptable to a broad range of stakeholders. In the poorer parts of the world, where CC impact is greatest and resources are scarce, CL is in its infancy and even more urgent.

We invite colleagues to submit contributions on any aspects of climate literacy – on learning processes, instructional materials, learning methods and experiences, and curricular innovation to promote greater CL. The full spectrum of CC science that might be covered by CL can be included, such as GHGs, reinforcing feedback, energy systems, heatwaves, sea-level rise, oceans, carbon cycle, ice melt, communication, attitudes, gender issues, health, political influence, activism, behavioural change and geoethics. The session is an opportunity for people (ECSs, scientists, educators, policy influencers, learning resource developers and other experts) to share their experience, expertise and research on effective ways of improving CL, to better fight CC.

Rationale
The proper and deep education on ethical issues in geosciences has been evolving in recent times, although not as quickly and deeply as necessary. Many of the professionals dedicated to Earth Sciences have been not in touch with such new concepts and tendencies as the concept of Geoethics. Geoethics is the research and reflection on the values which underpin appropriate behaviors and practices, wherever human activities interact with the Earth system. Geoethics provides a framework from which to define ethical professional behaviors in both geosciences and engineering, and to determine how these should be put into practice for the benefit of society and environment. The Short Course goes is directed towards introducing and training geoscientists in those new concept and ideas as well as exposing the perspectives of this field.

Course Content: (generic until we know the lecturers attending EGU2021 then, adjusted):
1. From Ethics to Geoethics: definition, values, tools
2. Responsible conduct of research and professionalism
3. Tools for Confronting (geo)ethical dilemmas
4. Geoethics for society: sustainable development and responsible mining
5. Geoethics in natural hazards
6. Geoethics in geoscience communication
7. Recent developments in geoethical thinking
8. Perspectives of Geoethics
9. Geoethics’ case studies: Paleontology, Water Management, Ocean Governance, etc.

Learning objectives
After completing this course, participants
1. Will know the basic principles of ethics and how these lead to geoethics
2. Will be aware of the dilemmas involved in making geoethical decisions
3. Will have gained some experience in taking a geoethical approach to real-world cases

Geoscience expertise is essential for the functioning of modern societies. All branches of geosciences have cultural, social and ethical implications. Hence, geoscientists face ethical issues in their professional and civic activities. Geoethics aims to provide a common framework for these concerns and to nourish a discussion on the fundamental values which underpin appropriate behaviors and practices, wherever human activities interact with the Earth system.

The spectrum of topics geoethics deals with includes:

• philosophical and historical aspects of geoscience, their contemporary relevance and their role in informing methods for effective and ethical decision-making;
• geoscience professionalism and deontology, research integrity and ensuring respectful working spaces, including issues related to harassment and discrimination, gender and disability in geosciences;
• ethical and social problems related to the management of land, air and water including environmental change, pollution and their impacts
• socio-environmentally sustainable supply of georesources (including energy, minerals and water), recognising the importance of effective regulation and policy-making, social acceptance, and understanding and promoting best practice;
• resilience of society related to natural and anthropogenic hazards, risk management and mitigation strategies;
• ethical aspects of geoscience education and communication as well as culture and value of geodiversity, geoconservation, geoheritage, geoparks and geotourism;
• role of geosciences in achieving socio-economic development that respects cultures, traditions and local development paths, regardless of countries' wealth, and in promoting peace, responsible and sustainable development and intercultural exchange.

Geoscientists’ knowledge and expertise are essential to address many of the most urgent global problems, to inform decision-making, and to guide education at all levels. The purpose is to equip citizens to discuss, shape and implement solutions to local, regional and global socio-environmental problems. Geoscientists who are aware of their ethical responsibilities will be able to put their knowledge at the service of society and to foster public trust in geosciences. This session, co-sponsored by the International Association for Promoting Geoethics, aims to develop ethical and social perspectives on the above topics, including case studies.

Following the success of previous years, this session will explore reasons for the under-representation of different groups (cultural, national and gender) by welcoming debate among scientists, decision-makers and policy analysts in the geosciences.

The session will focus on both obstacles that contribute to under-representation and on best practices and innovative ideas to remove those obstacles. Contributions are solicited on the following topics:

- Role models to inspire and further motivate others (life experience and/or their contributions to promote equality)
- Imbalanced representation, preferably supported by data, for awards, medals, grants, high-level positions, invited talks and papers
- Perceived and real barriers to inclusion (personally, institutionally, culturally)
- Recommendations for new and innovative strategies to identify and overcome barriers
- Best practices and strategies to move beyond barriers, including:

• successful mentoring programmes
• networks that work
• specific funding schemes
• examples of host institutions initiatives

- COVID- related data, discussions and initiatives

This session is co-organised with the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG) and the European Research Council (ERC).

In recent years, the geoscience community has been making strides towards making our science more open, inclusive, and accessible, driven both by individual- or community-led initiatives and by broader-scale regulatory changes. Open-source software, accessible codebases and open online collaboration resources (such as GitHub, VHub, etc.) are becoming the norm in many disciplines. The open-access publishing landscape has been changing too: several geoscience journals have defined data availability policies, and many publishers have introduced green and gold open-access options to their journal collections. Pre-print servers and grassroots diamond open-access journals are changing the readiness with which scholarly content can be accessed beyond the traditional paywall model.

However, good scientific practice requires research results to be reproducible, experiments to be repeatable and methods to be reusable. This can be a challenge in geosciences, with available data sets that are becoming more complex and constantly superseded by new, improved releases. Similarly, new models and computational tools keep emerging in different versions and programming languages, with a large variability in the quality of the documentation. Moreover, how data and models are linked together towards scientific output is very rarely documented in a reproducible way. As a result, very few published results are reproducible for the general reader. These challenges especially apply to hydrology, which is highlighted here as an example in the general geosciences.

This session is designed to gain a community overview of the current open-science landscape and how this is expected to evolve in the future. It aims to foster a debate on open science, lower the bar for engaging in open science and showcase examples, including software and other instruments for assisting open research. This may include software and tools, open science dissemination platforms (such as pre-print servers and journals), the teams driving the development of open-science resources and practices, and discussion on the regulatory moves towards standardising open access in the scientific community and what those policies mean in practice. The session has a focus on hydrological sciences, as an example within the geosciences. This session should advance the discussion on open and reproducible science, highlight its advantages and also provide the means to bring this into practice.

Almost 30 years of developing the concept of geodiversity in geosciences provides a robust foundation for moving to the issue of synthesizing the existing knowledge and methods of assessing geodiversity and to disseminate the achievements of this concept.
1. The spatial and temporal scales. On what cartographic scale should the source materials be useful for determining the degree of geodiversity? Can geodiversity be considered on a local, regional, national, continental and global scale? Having in place geodiversity (stationary, at a given time of observation/assessment) and dynamic geodiversity at your disposal - how deep, how far can you reach the past and the future in geodiversity assessments of any area? Can geodiversity be determined in a palaeogeographic/geological context? How can you use geodiversity to describe geosites, geoparks, landscapes, and other forms of geoconservation? How to translate geodiversity values into geoheritage measures?
2. The lack of a standard for geodiversity assessment. Is the quality or quantity (number) of assessed geodiversity features important? How to transform qualitative assessments into quantitative assessments, so that you can easily compare different areas in terms of their substantive value, not to mention independence from the spatial and temporal scale? These issues are related to the problem of uncertainty in geodiversity assessments. This problem affects applied geodiversity studies as well, limiting further qualitative/qualitative assessment of abiotic ecosystem services. So what should be the standards of this geodiversity assessment to minimize errors in assessments?
3. If we find a consensus in establishing a standard for geodiversity assessment, how to apply the developed standard at geoconservation and geoheritage? How to consider such a standard universally acceptable? What forms of activity should best promote the idea of geodiversity? How to implement geodiversity assessments by professionals for different forms of geoconservation and geoheritage? Which ecosystem services should be taken into account in determining the importance of geodiversity for human life? How to make the society aware of the importance of geodiversity in their everyday life? How to extend the geodiversity values to preserve the state of the environment for future generations? How to link the idea of geodiversity with 17 UN SDG? Finally, how should geodiversity values be compared with biodiversity values?

Liaising with stakeholders, policy-makers and society is becoming increasingly important for academic research to turn research into impactful action, but also to improve research by allowing society to take part within research processes in terms of co-producing knowledge and policy. In hydrological sciences, this is needed when implementing innovative solutions in areas such as river basin management, water allocation, impact-based hydrological forecasting, flood protection, drought risk management, climate change mitigation, ecohydrology and sustainable environmental solutions, among others.
Contributions focus on:
1. Science-policy interface in hydrology. How science influences policy and policies impact science? How scientists can provide easily digestible pieces of evidence to policy-makers? What are the key gaps in joining science to feasible policy solutions in the water sector? How can we use knowledge to improve policy, and vice-versa? How do we deal with uncertainty, adaptation, path dependencies but also with aspects of power, inequality and vested interests in the co-production of knowledge and policy?
2. Interdisciplinary collaborations. How do we create the interdisciplinary knowledge needed to address the questions faced by decision-makers and societal stakeholders? How have new, interdisciplinary, science questions been generated in response to existing and emerging research problems? How can individual disciplinary perspectives come together in interdisciplinary studies and experiments?
3. Hydrology as practiced within society. Who are the users of our knowledge, how useful is our knowledge for those societal users, how useful are our tools, models and methods? What approaches are available to support a fruitful collaboration between hydrological science and practitioners? And, since scientists are not removed from the things they study, how has hydrological science been shaped by the historical interplay of cultural, political and economic factors? What are the opportunities and challenges that this science/society nexus creates for producing scientific knowledge?

The work of scientists does not end with publishing their results in peer-reviewed journals and presenting them at specialized conferences. One side of the work that is becoming more and more relevant and often is required by funding agencies to be specified in one’s project proposal is outreach. What does outreach mean? Very simply, it means to engage with the non-scientific public and a wider audience than you are commonly used to. There are many ways to do outreach, from blogging and vlogging, using social media, write for a science dissemination journal, participate as a speaker to local science festivals, organize open-days in the laboratory and so on.
With this short course, we aim at giving you some practical examples of different outreach activities and tips and suggestions from personal and peers experiences. In the last part of the course, you will work singularly to come up with an outreach idea based on your research activity. You may use it on your next proposal, you never know!

Geoheritage is the human side of geosciences, where natural features are valued in relation to their societal, cultural and economic context. Geoheritage provides a way to appreciate and manage our environment, as well as being a window into geosciences for the broader public. Our fundamental geoscience is incomplete and meaningless unless it is contextualised, and geoheritage is an essential way to do this. Geoheritage is multidisciplinary, drawing from all sides of geosciences and extending them into social sciences, territorial and risk management, and economics. Geoheritage's basic building block is the geosite, a geographically defined distinct feature, and also includes collections, and buildings with natural stone. All geoheritage is underpinned by geodiversity, the fundamental study of topographic, lithological and geomorphological variability (covered in a linked EGU session, Visages of Geodiversity).
This session calls for a continuation of the rich multidisciplinary sessions in previous EGU meetings, where diverse actors in geoheritage have exchanged with the whole geosciences community on subjects ranging from: 1) the integration of geoscience research into geoheritage (how can you make your research have an impact?; 2) using geoheritage for responsible resource management; 3) geosite description, assessment and protection, including legislative aspects at all scales; 4) territorial management and urban geoheritage; 5) geoheritage and resilience to natural hazards; 6) geoheritage and degradation risk assessment; 7) case studies in geoheritage, including geotourism; 8) remote and geophysical geosciences as intangible geoheritage.
The session is planned to be be held with on-line presentations, with a physical poster session, and an open multidisciplinary splinter meeting, to meet and discuss. Geodiversity and geoheritage visages will combine in this to engage with a large public.

The session is supported by the IAG Working Group on Geomorphosites, the IUGS Commission for Geoheritage, the International Lithosphere Program, and UNESCO IGCP project 692 Geoheritage for Resilience.

World-wide an increasing number of research projects focus on the challenges associated with changes in the Arctic regions. Whereas these often have a natural and physical science focus, this session focuses on trans-disciplinary approaches to study the multiple phenomena associated with global warming, especially but not exclusively in Arctic regions. Another focus is to understand better how to tackle these in large, trans-disciplinary research projects, initiatives and programs (e.g. HORIZON2020 Nunataryuk, INTAROS and the T-MOSAIC program of the International Arctic Research Council, NSF Navigating the New Arctic), as well as communicating results effectively to the public in terms of outreach and education. Contributions are invited, but are not limited, to the following themes:
• science communication, education and outreach tools, and co-production of knowledge
• integration of social and natural science approaches
• indigenous and collaborative approaches to adaptation and mitigation, equitable mitigation, and risk perception
• socio-economic modelling in relation to Arctic environmental change,
• examining the impacts of permafrost thaw and other phenomena on health and pollution as well as infrastructure (and consequences of the built environment).

One of the aims of this session is to bring together researchers from both social and natural sciences who are involved or interested in reaching out to stakeholders and the general public, and share successful experiences. Examples from past, ongoing and future initiatives that include traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific tools and techniques are welcome.

We are also excited to let you know that our ERL special issue called 'Focus on Arctic Change: Transdisciplinary Research and Communication’ is now open for submission. See the webpage: https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-9326/page/Focus_on_Arctic_Change_Transdisciplinary_Research_and_Communication Please consider submitting your manuscript until or preferably before the 31st of May 2021.

Interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and geoscientists are becoming increasingly invaluable in communicating complex geoscience subjects to non-experts. Topics such as climate change can be contradictory and confusing to the general public, particularly in terms of uncertainty and impact. It is therefore vital that STEM communicators work to find alternative methods to enable dialogue between experts and the wider public on how to face and respond to these increasingly prevalent topics. It is becoming increasingly evident that both the scientific and the artist communities have a shared interest and responsibility in raising awareness of the limits to our planetary boundaries and the fragile stability and resilience of our Earth-System. In the past, this issue has been addressed mostly through traditional educational methods. However, there is mounting evidence that science-art collaborations can play a pivotal and vital role in this context by co-creating new ways of research and by stimulating the discussion by providing emotional and human context through the arts.

This session will combine a traditional academic poster session showcasing interdisciplinary research which will explore the dialogues between the geosciences and the arts alongside a display of art that aims to visually showcase these practises in action. Through symbiotically mixing STEM and the arts together in this way, the session aims to enable a discussion on how to use the two to explore and communicate the social, economic, political and environmental factors facing society and drive improved communication. In this edition, there will be a special spotlight on science/art collaboration that has been used to tackle the topic of planet sustainability.

Games have the power to ignite imaginations and place you in someone else’s shoes or situation, often forcing you into making decisions from perspectives other than your own. This makes them powerful tools for communication, through use in outreach, disseminating research, in education and teaching at all levels, and as a method to train the public, practitioners and decision makers in order to build environmental resilience.
Games can also inspire innovative and fun approaches to learning. Gamification and game-based approaches add an extra spark of engagement and interaction with a topic. Gaming technology, like virtual reality, transports and immerses people into new worlds providing fascinating and otherwise impossible experiences for learners.
In this session we welcome contributions from anyone who has used games, gaming technology, and/or game-based approaches in their research, their teaching, or public engagement activities.
The session will be supported by the legendary Games4Geo Games Night providing an opportunity to share and try games presented in this session. We welcome continuation of discussions in our Discord server - https://discord.gg/teQXBh5

In spite of advances in our scientific knowledge, disaster losses continue to rise globally, and this trend is expected to continue under climate change. Several global frameworks call for greater attention to the interface between science, policy and action to achieve resilience and reduce disaster losses. This session explores innovations in the area of applied sciences for assessing and communicating risk and resilience. Themes include: (i) concepts and novel methods of data collection to measure risk and resilience, (ii) best practice for engaging with communities and schoolchildren, (iii) ways to visualise and share information and (iv) reflections on policy and frameworks.

Do you consider yourself a science communicator or science communication researcher? Does your research group or institution participate in public engagement activities? Have you ever evaluated, studied, or published your education, outreach or engagement efforts? Scientists and communication practitioners engage non-peer audiences through numerous pathways including websites, blogs, public lectures, media interviews, and educational and research collaborations. A considerable amount of time and money is invested in these activities and they play an important role in how different publics come to understand scientific topics, issues, and the research process. However, few opportunities and incentives exist to optimise science communication practices and to evaluate the effectiveness of different engagement approaches. This session, run at both AGU and EGU, encourages critical reflection on science communication best practices and provides an opportunity for the community of science communicators and researchers to share best practices and experiences with evaluation and research in this field.

This session will also explore the way efficient communication strategies can help prevent, fight and debunk misinformation. Case studies, comparisons between different hazards and risks as well as best practices to fight misinformation at all stages of the risk cycle will be explored. Of special interest are contributions that take into account different aspects of communication (e.g. format, medium, actors, cultural context, time frame,...). The diversity of participants (researchers practitioners, journalists, educators, and policy makers) will enrich the discussion.

One of the most challenging sustainable goals of the UN 2030 Agenda and other international agreements is that urban systems have to increase well-being and health. Indeed, these networked systems already host more than half of the world's population and are going to host most of its growth, while they have been mostly designed and managed with limited visions, in particular with respect to their geophysical environment.
This goal got an unforeseen acuity with the Covid-19 pandemic, starting with the confinement strategies that radically brought into question the functioning of these systems, e.g., drastically reducing mobility and breaking its ever increasing trend. Covid-19 was not without precursor (e.g., SARS, MERS) and will not be without successors.

Long term visions based on transdisciplinary scientific advances are therefore indispensable, particularly from the geoscience community. As a consequence, this session calls for contributions from data-driven and theory-driven approaches of urban health under global change. This includes:
- qualitative improvements of epidemic modelling, as trans-disciplinary and nonlinear as possible
- possible interplays between meteorological and/or climate drivers and epidemic/health issues
- novel monitoring capabilities (including contacts tracking), data access, assimilation and multidimensional analysis techniques
- managing field works, geophysical monitoring and planetary missions
- how to have the highest science output during corona pandemic
- a fundamental revision of our urban systems, their greening as well as their mobility offer
- a particular focus on urban biodiversity, in particular to better manage virus vectors
- urban resilience must include resilience to epidemics, and therefore requires revisions of urban governance.

Citizen science (the involvement of the public in scientific processes) is gaining momentum across multiple disciplines, increasing multi-scale data production on Earth Sciences that is extending the frontiers of knowledge. Successful participatory science enterprises and citizen observatories can potentially be scaled-up in order to contribute to larger policy strategies and actions (e.g. the European Earth Observation monitoring systems), for example to be integrated in GEOSS and Copernicus. Making credible contributions to science can empower citizens to actively participate as citizen stewards in decision making, helping to bridge scientific disciplines and promote vibrant, liveable and sustainable environments for inhabitants across rural and urban localities.
Often, citizen science is seen in the context of Open Science, which is a broad movement embracing Open Data, Open Technology, Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Source, Open Methodology, and Open Peer Review. Before 2003, the term Open Access was related only to free access to peer-reviewed literature (e.g., Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002). In 2003 and during the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”, the definition was considered to have a wider scope that includes raw research data, metadata, source materials, and scholarly multimedia material. Increasingly, access to research data has become a core issue in the advance of science. Both open science and citizen science pose great challenges for researchers to facilitate effective participatory science, yet they are of critical importance to modern research and decision-makers. To support the goals of the various Open Science initiatives, this session looks at what is possible and what is applied in Earth Science.

We want to ask and find answers to the following questions:
Which approaches can be used in Earth Sciences?
What are the biggest challenges in bridging between scientific disciplines and how to overcome them?
What kind of participatory citizen scientist involvement and open science strategies exist?
How to ensure transparency in project results and analyses?
What kind of critical perspectives on the limitations, challenges, and ethical considerations exist?

Global plastic production has increased exponentially since the fifties, with 359 million metric tons manufactured in 2018 alone. Nearly 20% of this production took place within Europe, where at least half of discarded plastics collected for ‘recycling’ were instead exported to China and SE Asia. Every year, an increasing proportion of these plastics (in the order of millions of tons) enter and accumulate in our waterways and oceans. In riverine and marine systems, the presence of micro to macroplastic debris has generated a growing and persistent threat to the environment and ecosystems, as well as an urgent and multi-dimensional challenge for our society.

Methods for resource-efficient and large-scale detection and monitoring of plastic litter are still relatively new. However, in the last few years, they have blossomed across technologies and environments - from mounted cameras to drones to satellites, and from lakes and rivers to coastal waters and open oceans. These new technologies can be crucial to fill in the gaps between limited in situ observations and global models, allowing coverage across fine as well as large spatial scales, and over long time periods. We invite abstracts describing the use of cameras, drones, satellites and other remote sensing techniques to observe and monitor riverine and marine plastics. We also welcome work describing or demonstrating new approaches, methods and algorithms to improve the use of cameras and sensors for plastic detection on (and in) water.

As an integral part of terrestrial ecosystems, soils play a crucial role in the provision of numerous ecosystem services. Soil ecosystem services are vital components to all aspects of life and support the production of ecosystem goods and services, such as food and fiber production, water storage and climate and natural hazards regulation, among many others. The provision of soil ecosystem services relies on soil characteristics, processes and functions. Moreover, healthy and diverse soils ensure biodiversity among soil biota (soil biodiversity), which in turn guarantees the provision of soil ecosystem services. Incorrect land uses such as intense land management may critically reduce the ecosystem services provided by soils and result in land degradation through erosion, sealing or pollution processes. Sustainable land management and the conservation and restoration of degraded ecosystems is therefore key to maintain functional soils that can provide multiple ecosystem services. By 2030, the Agenda for Sustainable Development – the 17 ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ – are intended to be achieved. The role of soil science, and the work between soil scientists and other disciplines, will be paramount over the coming decade. In particular, healthy and sustainable soil management plans will need to ensure that soils continue to deliver services to ecosystems, societies, and economies. Global climate change and the burgeoning demands from a growing world population are set to place escalating pressures on soils, suggesting an urgent need to build resilience into soil management whilst also reversing current global trends of soil degradation.
In this session, we welcome contributions covering inter and transdisciplinary research through observational, theoretical and applied studies, on soil ecosystem services and soil function in the context of a changing global environment. Topics of interest are (although not limited to): 1) Impacts of soil degradation on soil function and ecosystem services, 2) Soil conservation and restoration actions for maintaining ecosystem services (including research, management, education and policy), 3) Linking soil ecosystem services and soil function in the context of the SDGs.

This session is supported by the project A09.3.3-LMT-K-712-01-0104 Lithuanian National Ecosystem Services Assessment and Mapping (LINESAM) is funded by the European Social Fund according to the activity “Improvement of researchers” qualification by implementing world-class R&D projects.

Building on our experiences and your feedback from last year, vEGU21 - Gather Online is a brand new format for sharing your research with EGU. Despite the challenges of the last 12 months, we are excited to offer this opportunity to gather together online to our worldwide community of geoscientists. We want to help you get the most out of this year’s meeting, so the EGU Communications Team are ready to guide you through this experience – with practical tips, guidelines, and examples. Stay curious!