International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

internationally coordinated funding and shared
infrastructure and enhance the recruitment of
young scientists into polar science.
e. Encourage the exploration of ways to continue
the innovative forms for IPY outreach and the
presentation of outcomes of the IPY, including the
use of scientific data and traditional knowledge in
future assessments.
As a direct result of these statements, the Arctic
Council, International Arctic Science Committee and
World Meteorological Organization formed the SAON
Steering Group (SG) to continue to develop the SAON
process. Co-chaired by John Calder (AMAP) and David
Hik (IASC), the Arctic Council was represented by one
representative formally appointed by each of the
eight Arctic Countries and representatives of relevant
AC Working Groups and Permanent Participants. The
SAON SG reaffirmed the SAON-IG’s vision of “free,
open, and timely access to high-quality data that will
realize pan-Arctic and global value-added services
and provide societal benefits” and determined that its
three top priority tasks were to engage government
agency officials to seek a path toward sustained Arctic
observing, to work more closely with local Arctic
communities to better integrate community-based
observations with scientific observations and to
improve data management and data access practices.
Members of the SAON SG attended an IPY Data
Management workshop in Ottawa, Ontario in September
2009. They were informed of the plans for creating
an international comprehensive data base of all IPY
projects over the next year or so. It was acknowledged
that the SAON networks should be incorporated in
this data base, even though many pre-dated the IPY.
To ensure that this happens, the SAON SG and the IPY
Data Management Subcommittee (DMS) held a joint
workshop during the IPY conference in Oslo in June
2010 (Chapter 5.6) to share information on current data
management practices of the networks and expose
the networks to the desired data management practices
developed by the IPY DMS (Chapter 3.11).
Members of the SAON SG engaged with community-based
monitoring groups to explore integration of
their results with those obtained by the scientific community.
A very useful collaboration was developed
with the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge
of the Arctic (ELOKA) project created under IPY
funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation
(Chapter 5.2). The goal of ELOKA is to facilitate the collection,
preservation, exchange and use of local observations
and knowledge of the Arctic by providing
data management and user support services. A key
challenge of community-based research and monitoring
is to have an effective and appropriate means of
recording, storing, and managing data and information.
Another challenge is to find an effective means
of making such data available to Arctic residents and
researchers, as well as other interested groups such
as teachers, students, scientists and decision makers.
Without a network and data management services
to support these efforts, a number of problems have
arisen such as, misplacement or loss of extremely precious
data from Elders who have passed away, lack of
awareness of previous studies causing repetition of
research, research fatigue in communities and wasted
resources, as well as a reluctance or inability to initiate
or maintain community-based science activities without
an available data management system. Thus there
is an urgent need for effective and appropriate means
of recording, preserving and sharing the information
collected in Arctic communities. Geographic Information
Systems and web-based mapping are important
for displaying and communicating community-based
science. Rather than duplicating work, the SAON SG
looks to ELOKA as one of the key building blocks for
the future sustained Arctic observing network and will
seek ways to enhance its capabilities.
A workshop for government agency officials
was held in March 2010 in association with the
“State of the Arctic” Conference in Miami, Florida.
Approximately 60 participants discussed the merits
of the SAON process and provided recommendations
for the actions needed to transform SAON from the
planning stage to the implementation stage. The main
recommendation was to define specific tasks with
their resource requirements that should form the initial
phase of implementation. Explicit was the recognition
that financial commitments would be needed from
the interested governments and that the central
component of SAON would almost certainly have to
be funded as a project activity. Additional tasks would
also need support, but could be conducted either as
in-kind contributions or funded activities. Examples
of specific tasks were suggested with most focused
o b s e r v I n g s Y s t e m s a n d d a t a m a n a g e m e n t 421