Chair: Stein Sandven, NERSC; co-chair: Louise Mercer, Northumbria University.
Summary of the sessions
The session had three presentations about community-based monitoring (CBM) in the ongoing CAPARDUS H2020 projects in Greenland, Alaska, Svalbard and Yakutia. In addition, one presentation described ongoing CBM work in Yukon, Canada. The CBM activities are highly different from one region to another, depending on the purpose of the observations. The most important topics for CBM programs are fisheries, herding and hunting, forestry, mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, shipping and tourism. A common challenge for all the CBM programs is funding, especially sustainable funding, which is necessary for developing and maintaining the observations over long time. Another challenge is sharing of information and data between the different CBM programs. It is of great benefit for all CBM activities to exchange experience and learn from each other, while following the CARE principles. Efforts to share information between CBMs have been initiated through a web-based atlas (https://www.arcticcbm.org/index.html ), but the atlas needs to be updated regularly, which again depends on funding. Another capacity-sharing activity is the POLAR Collaboration community under OBPS, where documents on Arctic practices are ingested. This repository can be recommended as a useful system for storing, searching and accessing CBM-related documents (https://repository.oceanbestpractices.org/handle/11329/1291 ).