The Arctic Science Summit Week (ASSW) 2021, organized by Portugal, took place from the 19th to 26th of March 2021. The virtual conference gathered international and interdisciplinary researchers to discuss topics framed by the overarching theme “The Arctic: Regional Changes, Global Impacts”. This included science community and business meetings, a cultural day, and a science symposium.
During the week, projects and scientists presented their recent results and the conference offered everyone high-level discussions and science transfer of Arctic and Antarctic knowledge and development.
The Association for Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), together with the Polar Prediction Project (PPP) International Coordination Office and The Young Earth System Science (YESS) network organized a workshop for Early Career Researchers on “Polar Prediction and Collaboration in the Arctic”. The workshop, held during the business meetings, comprised three sessions held over two days, across time zones.
In the first session, “Home Office (Fatigue) and Zoom Networking – COVID-19 and ECRs”, a lively discussion followed five brief presentations on recent national and international surveys. These discussions highlighted the experiences of researchers, and especially early career researchers, during the pandemic and described the variety of ways in which scientific work and researcher’s lives have been impacted.
The broad scope of the five presentations in Session 2, “The 4 Essential Cs - Coordination, Communication, Community, and Collaboration”, examined the various ways in which these 4 Cs are crucial to polar research. From finding ways to use your data to tell an engaging story when communicating science to the public, through coordinating and fostering international, interdisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration, this session highlighted the importance of Arctic research and the need to engage and motivate all aspects of the community.
In the final session, “Predict and Predictability - The Arctic YOPP”, 10 researchers associated with the Year of Polar Prediction and its YOPP-endorsed projects introduced some of the research activities being carried out to improve prediction in the Arctic and showcased available meteorological datasets and how to access them. This session brought together opportunities for ECRs to engage with the YOPP community and advertised some upcoming education activities. Keep an eye on the PPP and APECS social media channels and websites for future announcements.
You can find more information about the individual sessions and the speakers here. Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for these sessions. For those who could not, the recordings from each of the sessions are available at the APECS vimeo site or APECS website.
Written by Clare Earys (APECS) and Mayleen Schlund (PPP ICO)
