Report from the International Permafrost Association: High level of permafrost interdisciplinary research activity

The big question following the boost of permafrost activities during the International Polar Year (IPY), 2007–2008, was if they would remain at this level thereafter? To answer this question we need to review the status of subsequent permafrost research activities. Since IPY, one of the largest international permafrost research projects is the ‘Changing Permafrost in the Arctic and its Global Effects in the 21st Century’ PAGE21 operating in the period 2011–2015. PAGE21 is a large-scale integrating collaborative project within the 7th framework of the EU, coordinated by Professor Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, AWI, Germany. The PAGE21 consortium consists of leading European and international permafrost specialists, covering the entire spectrum of research from field studies, process studies, and remote sensing to global climate modelling. The consortium consists of 18 international partners from the following countries: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Great Britain, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway, Russian Federation and Sweden. PAGE21 forms the basis for accurate representation of permafrost-related processes in global climate projections, the lack of which has, until now, hampered assessments of the feedbacks of Arctic carbon pools to global climate change. The PAGE21 field sites are selected to cover a wide range of environmental conditions and to offer the best available platforms for the validation of large-scale models, the development of permafrost monitoring capabilities, the study of permafrost processes, and for overlap with existing monitoring programs. Site selection was also driven by the necessity to focus on the smaller number of field sites that are able to provide a comprehensive range of monitoring parameters for validating Global Climate Models (GCMs) across the Arctic permafrost areas. The PAGE21 field sites span the whole spectrum of conditions observed in the Arctic, from the sporadic permafrost zone in the sub-Arctic in Abisko, N Sweden, extending to the continuously cold permafrost zone in Kytalyk, Siberia. The sites also cover different geographical zones of the Arctic, with sites in North America, Greenland and Europe/ Russia surrounding the Arctic Ocean, and including maritime as well as continental locations. Participants in the September 2013 General Assembly of the PAGE21 project in the auditorium in Abisko field station, Sweden. Another large project including permafrost within the Top-level Research Initiative (TRI) aiming to strengthen research and innovation regarding climate change issues in the Nordic Region is the project ‘Impacts of a changing cryosphere – depicting ecosystem-climate feedbacks from permafrost, snow and ice’ DEFROST. DEFROST is a Nordic Centre of Excellence which in 2010 was funded for a five-year period by the Nordic Council of Ministers. DEFROST is coordinated by Professor Torben R. Christensen, Lund University, Sweden, and is a network of 14 Nordic partner institutions. The aim of DEFROST is to understand how climate-change-induced changes in the cryosphere influence the ecosystem/geosphere processes which directly affect climate. The focus is on key terrestrial, lacustrine and marine cryospheric components that have the potential for giving rise to substantial changes in climate feedback mechanisms both in terms of surface-atmosphere energy exchange and exchanges of greenhouse gases. DEFROST seeks to bridge existing gaps between climate modeling, cryospheric science, and Arctic ecosystem science. The specific aims of DEFROST are to improve our understanding of arctic terrestrial and shallow sub-sea permafrost interactions with climate, to provide improved data on energy exchange, carbon cycling and GHG emissions from terrestrial and near-coastal cryospheric environments, and to improve climate modelling capabilities for simulating the feedback processes associated with observed changes in permafrost, snow and ice. DEFROST has five key field sites ranging from the Laptev Sea over Svalbard to Greenland and Scandinavia. Nationally, several large permafrost projects are running. In Canada the large project ‘Arctic Development and Adaptation to Permafrost in Transition’ ADAPT, is an NSERC Discovery Frontiers grant bringing together 15 laboratories across Canada and many collaborations to develop an integrated Earth systems science framework on diverse aspects related to thawing permafrost conditions in the Canadian Arctic. ADAPT is coordinated by Professor Warwick F. Vincent, Université Laval, Canada. ADAPT is organized as four interlocking research modules to address a broad, representative spectrum of natural science and engineering issues within the Integrated Permafrost Systems framework. This Integrated Permafrost Systems Science approach focuses on how changing permafrost and snowfall affect tundra landscapes, water and wildlife, and the implications for Northern communities and industries, who depend on these resources. Integration is seen as the key to ADAPT's success, and therefore a set of six standard protocols has been developed to coordinate and increase common fieldwork sampling/record efforts. These are available on the project website: www.cen.ulaval.ca/adapt/index.php. In the US the ‘Next-generation Ecosystem Experiments’, NGEE is a large-scale project which focus on improving climate prediction in high-latitude ecosystems by requiring a better understanding of permafrost and snow dynamics and the many cascading impacts of a changing geophysical system on vegetation, subsurface processes, land-atmospheric interactions, and landscape processes. It is the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research which is supporting the NGEE. Stan D. Wullschleger is the project principal investigator, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA. The project team has five US laboratories and universities involved in addition to scientific advisors from 5 other US universities. The overarching NGEE science question is: How does thawing of permafrost - and the associated changes in landscape evolution, hydrology, soil biogeochemical processes, and plant community succession affect feedbacks to the climate system? Geomorphological features - including thaw lakes, drained thaw lake basins, and ice-rich polygonal ground - provide the organizing framework for integrating process studies and observations from the pore or core scale (micron to tens of centimetres) to plot (metres to tens of metres) and landscape (kilometres) scales. Within these discrete geomorphological units, mechanistic studies in the field and laboratory are targeting four critical and interrelated components—water, nitrogen, carbon, and energy dynamics—that determine whether the Arctic is, or in the future will become, a negative or positive feedback to anthropogenically forced climate change. Multiscale research activities organized around these components include hydrology and geomorphology, vegetation dynamics, biogeochemistry, and energy transfer processes. The key field site is at Barrow, Alaska. In Denmark a large-scale project called ‘Center for Permafrost’, CENPERM, was started in 2012, funded in six years by a Centre of Excellence grant from the Danish National Research Foundation. In CENPERM different scientific disciplines meet to investigate the biological, geographical and physical effects of permafrost thawing. The director of CENPERM is Professor Bo Elberling, and CENPERM contains staff from several departments at University of Copenhagen and Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, with some international staff members as well. CENPERM focus on that due to global warming permafrost is thawing over large tracts of the Arctic. Thawing increases the decomposition by microorganisms of the enormous stock of organic material stored in permafrost soil. During the decomposition carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are released to the atmosphere, potentially increasing global warming. Research is carried out by a combination of field experiments in Greenland, Svalbard, northern Sweden and Russia under extreme conditions with experiments under controlled conditions in the laboratories at University of Copenhagen. There are 10 key research sites all over Greenland covering landscapes with sporadic to continuous permafrost. The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) is the official data portal of CENPERM. This ensures that data will be available and subsequently can be used in a global context. In Japan the overall GRENE Arctic Climate Change Research Project is running from 2011 to 2016. The National Institute of Polar Research is coordinating this overall project in association with the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. More than 300 scientists from 35 organizations are participating in the project, tackling all aspects of the Arctic climate system; the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, land and ecosystems from a multi-disciplinary approach. The focus on permafrost is mainly on research to study the change in the terrestrial ecosystems of the pan-Arctic and effects on climate. This work is coordinated by Dr. Atsuko Sugimoto, Hokkaido University. This focus include conducting field observations on frozen soil, vegetation, production of ecosystems, carbon storage, snow cover and albedo as well as methane emission along with other measurements to develop terrestrial system models that can reproduce realistic changes in the thawing of frozen soil, vegetation, and greenhouse gas emissions. The project studies terrestrial ecosystems throughout the circum-polar Arctic region, by continuing observations at existing field observation sites, in combination with establishing new sites, to combine observations using a mobile system to monitor spatial variation and multiple site observations with simple soil temperature probes. The European Space Agency (ESA) funded Data User Element (DUE) project on permafrost starting in 2009 has been a major technological permafrost activity coordinated from Vienna University of Technology, Austria by Dr. Annett Bartsch. The main purpose of the ESA DUE Permafrost project was to define, demonstrate and validate, permafrost monitoring information service from local to large scale, mainly towards climate change studies and addressing the pan-boreal/arctic zone. The service supported the GCOS implementation plan with systematic satellite-based Earth Observations of global permafrost extent, change and related products. It also supported permafrost monitoring activities of national and intergovernmental bodies and scientific groups involved in climate change research. This was clearly a technological innovation, which is very important for upscaling the traditional direct point permafrost measurements to landscape and larger scales. In addition to the above mentioned large-scale, longer lasting research projects there are several other national or regional projects and networks concerning permafrost. Also following the IPY we have seen renewed activity within the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) to develop a full-scale international permafrost database. Much of this work is now done in very close collaboration with the PAGE21 project, enabling a significant technological improvement for this key permafrost service. In May 2013 the GTN-P National correspondents met at the WMO in Geneva for the first time to discuss the future structure of GTN-P, and have a first hands-on introduction to the online GTN-P system being developed jointly by GTN-P and PAGE21. To have an online permafrost database is a key ambition for the International Permafrost Association, as this is necessary and useful for all the presented permafrost projects and for all users of permafrost data. Also this year a Thematic Network on Permafrost (TNP) has been established within the University of the Arctic coordinated by the IPA Standing Committee on Education and Outreach. The primary goal for TNP is to establish, sustain and strengthen a network of university institutions that give permafrost research based education primarily between University of the Arctic members, and with some partners from outside the University of the Arctic. This network will promote research, education collaboration and joint projects in the area of permafrost, its impact on environment and adaptation to climate change. The main form of cooperation will be joint research and education projects such as summer schools, ambitions to develop a joint Master/Ph.D. program, as well as knowledge sharing aimed at addressing, in a multidisciplinary way, the contemporary issues in the field of cryosphere focusing on permafrost in the northern regions. In conclusion, the level of permafrost research activity and education has remained high following the IPY. Most likely we have never had as much permafrost activity as now. This is mainly due to the clear increase in interdisciplinary permafrost research including now researchers from many scientific topics, such as microbiology, remote sensing, engineering, geomorphology, ecology, geochemistry, geology, pedology and geography. This timely development clearly brings permafrost into the scientific spotlight much more strongly than before.

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