The US National Science Foundation has confirmed it will support PAGES' activities until mid-2018. And the Swiss NSF, until the end of 2015 with an invitation to re-submit a proposal under Future Earth.
We thank the NSFs for their vote of confidence that means we can continue to deliver good things for the paleo-community over the next few years.
In a recent Global Environmental Change paper, members of PAGES' Regional Integration Theme use paleoecological data to propose a framework that integrates social wellbeing and environmental boundaries to define safe and just operating spaces at the regional scale.
This approach provides clear visual images for making comparisons between different regions, and can provide a practical basis for policy makers to raise the standards of social conditions in a region while reducing the likelihood of crossing ecological boundaries.
The EarthCube initiative is now transitioning into a new and important phase that will require active input from geoscience researchers.
Volunteers are sought to serve on a number of committees and teams from October 2014 to September 2015.
The Arctic2k working group have just published an Arctic proxy temperature database for the past 2,000 years.
This is an extended and revised version of the database used to reconstruct Arctic temperatures in the 2k Consortium study in Nature Geoscience in 2013.
Taking Earth’s Temperature: Delving into Climate’s Past, an hour-long documentary produced by filmmakers at Northern Arizona University’s IDEA Lab with contributions from many PAGES-affiliated scientists, is now available on DVD.
Using footage from both the field and labs in the US and Europe as well as numerous interviews and graphics, it showcases scientific discoveries in climate change research and demonstrates the value and relevance of researching past climates. The work of the PAGES 2k Network features prominently.
A New Phytologist paper, which emerged from a PAGES-supported meeting in the US in August 2012, addresses climate refugia, i.e. locations where taxa survive periods of regionally adverse climate, and reviews three major methods used to infer their existence.
Past refugia can help with identifying contemporary refugia and clarify their conservation significance by revealing more about the processes and locations that buffer species against rapidly changing climate.
Recent article in Geophysical Research Letters, features contributions from members of PAGES' Past Interglacials (PIGS) Working Group, and presents EPICA Dome C ice core data to document interglacial temperature changes occurring over the East Antarctic plateau.
