GEO Mountains

The GEO Mountains General Meeting (May 2022) provided an opportunity to bring members of the Initiative together, share recent progress, and discuss plans for the 2023-2025 GEO Work Programme period.

Help shape climate change adaptations in Valle dei Laghi and the wider Trentino-Alto Adige region by providing your expertise via this IMPETUS survey.

Residents and experts working in the Valle dei Laghi and wider Trentino-Alto Adige region have the opportunity to contribute to a major project that is testing and creating solutions to help the valley adapt to the impacts of climate change.

In a new research article from GEO Mountains, Thornton et al. analyse the coverage of in situ climatological observations across the world's mountains. 

In situ climatological data from the world's mountains are crucial for many applications. As such, any limitations associated with such data (e.g., limited spatial density of stations, short record lengths, relative lack of observations at higher elevations, etc.) can impinge upon several important activities, not least tracking changing mountain climates, better understanding the key processes and feedbacks involved, and making reliable projections of change impacts.

The GEO Mountains General Inventory is a free online resource that seeks to provide comprehensive metadata related to open datasets and data portals that may be useful in the context of mountainous applications.

Discovering potentially useful mountain datasets and other resources is often a time-consuming and frustrating task that requires speculative web searches or trawling through the vast array of data portals that have proliferated. Alternatively, institutional or legacy knowledge may have to be relied upon. These difficulties take researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers away from their core tasks, and mean that the most suitable and/or latest datasets for a given application may not be consistently used.

This GEO Mountains workshop sought to better understand the current interdisciplinary 'data landscape' across the mountains of Africa.  

Over the past few weeks, GEO Mountains has hosted the inaugural meetings of each of its 11 Task Groups. Collectively, the Task Groups span the full breadth of the GEO Mountains Implementation Plan – from helping contribute to our inventories and supporting nascent systematic mountain monitoring initiatives to developing training and capacity development resources (including “Knowledge Packages”) that seek to deliver the latest science into policy circles effectively.   

Attendance across the series of meetings was solid, but what really stood out was the exceptional degree of engagement with the challenges at hand exhibited by the participants. We are truly fortunate to be able to count such individuals and the institutions that support them amongst our network! Following each meeting, a video recording and brief written summary were circulated all volunteers, including those who were unable to attend on this occasion.

The Group on Earth Observations’ Global Network for Information and Observations in Mountain Environments (GEO Mountains) has had a busy and productive year.

Our Members/Participants have collaborated effectively with the staff of the GEO Mountains Secretariat to undertake a rich programme of inventory development, fundamental research, and communication and dissemination activities.

The GEO Mountains General Meeting 2021 served as a platform for exchange, bringing participants up to speed on recent developments at GEO Mountains and inviting discussion on the activities of Task Groups. GEO Mountains participants also provided key updates on ongoing projects that could contribute to the objectives of GEO Mountains.

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