Permafrost Research Priorities Update – 650 Questions Received

The Permafrost Research Priorities survey for submitting future research questions closed on 20 September. We have received almost 650 questions from more than 300 participants. The IPA and the Climate and Cryosphere Project (CliC) thank the community for this great response to the project.

PRP_picture

The PRP core group will now review the submitted questions to assure they meet the criteria by Sutherland et al. (2011) outlined at the beginning of the project, discard questions that do not meet the criteria, merge similar questions, and if necessary, reword questions with grammatical errors or other language issues. This will set the stage for the community ranking set to start in November.

A list of all the submitted questions and preliminary figures depicting demographic data can be found here.

Preliminary statistics from part two (demographics) of the survey show that:

  • The respondents come from 37 countries
  • A majority of the respondents (69 %) are men working within academia (68%)
  • 79 % of the respondents have a PhD as their highest academic degree
  • The respondents have a wide range of areas of primary expertise, the most common being geomorphology (13 % of respondents), ecology, engineering and infrastructure, and climate change (each 8 % of respondents) and the least common being industrial development and impacts (no respondent), land use and community planning (1 respondent), and mapping (1 respondent).
  • Age distribution and years of experience working with permafrost related issues for respondents are across the full spectrum.

The PRP core group looks forward to getting your input again in the voting process, which is scheduled from November 10 to December 18. Invitations to the voting process will be sent to all who provided their contact email in the survey form, and will also be publicly announced through list-serves such as permalist and cryolist.

For more information, please visit http://www.climate-cryosphere.org/activities/targeted/permafrost-research-priorities.