Meeting Materials YSM 2017

Meeting Materials YSM 2017

Welcome to the 3rd PAGES YSM held in Morillo de Tou!

PAGES and the local organizing committee, Quaternary Terrestrial Environments group (Pyrenean Institute of Ecology-CSIC), welcome you to Spain.

The Open Science Meeting (OSM) and the associated Young Scientists Meeting (YSM) are the premier scientific events of Past Global Changes (PAGES), a core project of Future Earth and a scientific partner of the World Climate Research Programme. The YSM is a stepping-stone for early-career researchers who want to develop their professional skills and expand their scientific network. The 3rd PAGES YSM will be held in Morillo de Tou (approximately 100km north of Zaragoza) from 7-9 May 2017 and the 5th PAGES OSM will be held in Zaragoza from 9-13 May 2017.

Theme

The theme of the OSM and YSM is "Global Challenges for our Common Future: a paleoscience perspective."

These meetings will fully reflect the PAGES structure and themes of climate, environment and humans, the strengthening of the connections between PAGES working groups and the increasing importance of an interdisciplinary approach.

Special Issue

See the special issue of Climate of the Past based on the 2017 YSM meetings.

YSM Group Zaragoza

Invited lecturers

The Cenozoic evolution of biotic and geophysical diversity in the tropical Andes and Amazon
The Amazon Basin and tropical Andes are among the great centers of Neotropical diversity and endemism. Various aspects of the dynamic long-term history of the region, including uplift of the Andes, geomorphic evolution of the Amazon River drainage, and climate variation have been posited to drive diversification and extinction and the resultant evolution of the region’s incomparable biodiversity. I will review some of the models linking environmental history and biodiversity and discuss some of the major unknowns about evolutionary processes in this vast region.

Sherilyn Fritz, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, USA

About the lecturer: Sheri Fritz is the George Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, with appointments in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences. Her research interests are in long-term environmental change, particularly using the fossil record to reconstruct natural patterns of climate variation, ecosystem response to environmental variability, and evolutionary change. She has major research projects in the tropical Andes and Amazon Basin of South America and the North American Great Plains and northern Rocky Mountains. Fritz leads several interdisciplinary groups and initiatives, including serving as co-chair of PAGES, President of the American Quaternary Association, and co-director of a large US NSF-funded project on the evolution of biodiversity in tropical South America.

On the creation and management of a (PAGES) working group
What are best practices for creating and managing an international, multidisciplinary scientific working group? I will discuss ideas and experiences that have emerged from several PAGES2k working groups, among them Ocean2k, and challenges going forward in 2017. A focus on big questions is exciting, diversifies the team, and plays to the strengths of community-wide initiatives. Crowdsourcing allows many hands to make light work. Collaboration technologies facilitate global participation. Perhaps most important is the continuing development of a working culture in which inclusivity, communication, intellectual generosity, transparency, personal responsibility, hard work, positive reinforcement, flat management, skeptical discussion, respect, humor, optimism and new voices are actively encouraged.

Michael N. Evans, Department of Geology and Earth System Science, Interdisciplinary Center University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

About the lecturer: Mike Evans received his PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences in 1999 from Columbia University. He is Associate Professor of Geology with a joint appointment at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at Maryland. His research interests include development of new tropical paleoclimatic datasets, proxy system modeling, synthesis of observations and simulations of late Holocene environments for process understanding, and uncertainty quantification. He was overall lead for the Ocean2k project from its inception in 2011 until 2015, served on the 2K Coordinators Team from 2012-2015, and has served on the PAGES Scientific Steering Committee since 2016. He otherwise keeps busy raising his two daughters, making fermented foods, gardening, practicing yoga, and getting lost while on bicycle tour.
Photo credit: The Plains, VA, USA October 2016, taken by Maya Evans.

Sessions

YSM01: Climate system dynamics

This session welcomes papers aiming for a more accurate understanding of the processes at work in the climate system, both at the regional and the global scale, covering timescales of a few centuries to several million years. In particular, we invite presentations contributing to improve reconstruction of the past climate state through various climate parameters (high resolution, well dated, wide coverage), such as temperature, precipitation, atmospheric pressure field, sea ice coverage, ocean circulation and sea level. It includes presentations studying the underlying processes of the Earth system changes, including their response to changes in forcings, internal feedbacks and teleconnections. This session also aims to promote data-model comparison.

YSM02: Biosphere and ecosystem dynamics

This session is dedicated to diagnosing the global behavior of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems in different timescales and their responses to global change. In particular, we invite presentations contributing to the understanding of the biophysical interactions and the biogeochemical exchanges with the atmosphere and the oceans, with special focus on the global carbon cycle. Contributions on vegetation history and biotic response to climate, in particular at the regional level, are also welcome.

YSM03: Human-Climate-Ecosystem interactions

This session addresses long-term interactions between past climate conditions, environmental changes and human activities. We invite papers dealing with the interactions between the biosphere system and the climate system, as well as their feedbacks. Studies about societal impacts of these environmental changes and the ecological impacts of human activities from local to regional scale are encouraged. Reconstruction of the human, climate and ecosystem components of the Earth system and their interactions using natural archives, documentary and instrumental data, historical, paleoecological and archaeological records are invited.

YSM04: Abrupt changes and threshold responses

This session focuses on abrupt changes and thresholds in the Earth system. Special attention will be given to early warning that can strengthen our ability to successfully predict these abrupt changes and thresholds. We invite studies of geological, chemical and biological records that capture large-scale, abrupt shifts in environmental and climate systems. Studies about regions highly sensitive to abrupt changes and prone to strong positive feedback are welcome. Studies of early warning signals of approaching tipping points in the Earth system based on accurate and well-dated reconstructions of the past behavior of climatic, environmental and archeological systems, used to better understand the underlying mechanisms and test models of future change, are encouraged.

YSM05: Modeling

This session welcomes papers about research on modeling the different components of the Earth system; i.e. atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, pedosphere and biosphere. In particular, we invite papers about the most recent developments in the representation of these components, the interactions between them and the mutual impact with human societies. It includes both global and regional modeling.

YSM06: New technical and methodological development in past global changes

Numerous tools are continuously developed to improve our knowledge of past global changes. In particular, high resolution long-term records of independently and accurately dated reconstructions are extremely valuable. Moreover, new proxies are continuously being searched for to reconstruct past global changes. This session invites papers dealing with the new tools allowing a better understanding of the interactions and the processes at work in the Earth System. It includes absolute and relative dating, built up of highly reliable timescales, new approaches to improve coherent chronologies, efforts on interpretation and development of new proxies, and calibration refinements.

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