Creating Connections in the Arctic Educational Science Community (ConnectED) led by the University of Faroe Islands and linked to Teacher Education for Social Justice and Diversity.

Project partners: University of Lapland, University of Alaska Anchorage, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, University of Aberdeen, Murmansk Arctic State University, University of Prince Edward Island, University of Iceland.

The project aims to create connections between early career scholars and researchers across the Arctic by organising a series of researcher visits. The visiting teams will include a doctoral student or early career scholar and senior researcher. The visit programmes will consist of e.g. guest lectures, participation to mentoring discussions with the doctoral students of the host university, and visits to local schools or other relevant places. After each visit, the hosting and visiting teams will analyse the visit and their learning results in a blog post. In the end of project, the partners will collect tips and best practice of organising researcher visits, and it will be published in a visual form in the network website. The project milestones are 1) detailed planning of the researcher team visits, 2) implementing the visits, and 3) evaluation and summarising the learning results. The target audiences of the project are doctoral students and early career scientists, senior researchers, partner universities and the Arctic educational science community.

BEfore the FLUXes – a research training network at the frontier of environmental monitoring in the arctic, with a particular focus on greenhouse gas flux studies (BEFLUX) led by Aarhus University and linked to Thematic Network on Arctic Boreal Hub, Herbivory and Communicating Arctic Science.

Project partners: Oulu University, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Oslo University, Copenhagen University, Helsinki University. 

Building on long-term ecosystem monitoring data from Greenland the BEFLUX network and summer schools will provide a platform for research training on the topic of arctic ecosystem functioning in relation to large scale climate variability and change. Focus in practical components will be on greenhouse gas exchanges but a wide range of other ecosystem parameters will be considered as well. A summer school in Oulanka Finland will have focus on hands-on possibilities for learning and applying own measurements in the field and a second course in Greenland with a broader ecosystem focus will include also social aspects and local community perspectives on the ecosystems and their functioning as observed using long term monitoring. The project will include development of an elearning tool and the target audience will be Master and PhD students from throughout the circumpolar North. The deliverables will be the e-learning course component and summer schools. These can be taken individually and when combined with the e-learning module they will be worth 5
ECTS for students each.

Widening the Impact of the Thematic Network on Collaborative Resource Management led by Nordisk Fond for Miljø og Udvikling (NORDECO) and linked to Thematic Network on Collaborative Resource Management.

Project partners: Greenland Climate Research Centre, Hokkaido University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR), Arctic Environment Research Center (AERC)

The project will consolidate, and further develop, the UArctic Thematic Network on Collaborative Resource Management. This Thematic Network is focused on interdisciplinary training in collaborative natural resource management and monitoring in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic. Moreover, the project will organize an interdisciplinary, and practice-based, experience-exchange workshop in Greenland for resource users, managers, researchers and recently graduated students and subsequently convene a network dialogue meeting in Alaska that will bring the network participants together. Thematic focus will be on best practices in co-production of knowledge and in connecting the results of user-based and scientific knowledge.

The key milestones are 1) workshop participants invited, 2) a portfolio of good practices in Arctic knowledge co-production and analyses documented and discussed at the workshop and dialogue meeting, and 3) a work and finance plan for the Thematic Network developed and agreed upon at the dialogue meeting. The target audience of the workshop and dialogue meeting are public natural resource managers and Arctic-based students. The main deliverables are strengthened capacity among 25 public resource managers, researchers and students in combining knowledge approaches in practice (Del. 1); guidelines for knowledge co-production in Arctic natural resource management (Del. 2); and an improved network (Del. 3).

UArctic wishes success to the projects and looks forward to hearing more when their work has kicked off!