As part of our mission to promote research on mountain regions across borders and disciplines through connection and collaboration, the Mountain Research Initiative issued a call for synthesis workshops in December last year. The purpose of this call was to provide funding for workshops that bring together global change researchers in order to address specific topics of interest to the mountain research community.

A total of 14 workshop proposals were submitted and eligible for review by our panel, which was comprised of MRI Principal Investigators, MRI Science Leadership Council members, and the MRI Executive Director. 

We are now delighted to announce that – due to their novel approaches to the review and synthesis of key themes relevant to the MRI and its community – the following three proposals have been selected:

1. WEATHER: a scientific approach in Water sEcurity and climATe cHange adaptation in pEruvian glacieRs
Main Proponent: Jorge Abad Cueva, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología, Peru.

2. Transformative change as a response to climate change in mountain social-ecological systems (TRANSMOUNT)
Main Proponent: Ignacio Palomo, Basque Centre for Climate Change, Spain.

3. Contribution of Long-term Ecological Research Programs in mountains to global policy agendas and UN
Main Proponent: Christophe Randin, Department of Ecology & Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

We expect that these workshops will take place between July-September 2019, and we also expect to be able to share details of these workshop activities and their outcomes in future communications.

These workshops build on the legacy of previous MRI-funded synthesis workshops which took place in 2017, one on Land Cover and Land Use Change in the Tropical Andes and one on Treeline Spatial Patterns.

A new call for synthesis workshops for 2020 is expected to be made at the end of this year.