GEO-GNOME ‘Status and Scoping Workshop’

Since being incorporated into the GEO Work Programme 2017-2019 as a GEO Initiative, GEO-GNOME (Global Network for Observations and Information on Mountain Environments) has sought to connect and facilitate access to diverse sources of mountain observation data and information regarding drivers, conditions, and trends in biophysical and socio-economic processes of change at different scales. In 2017, following a change in leadership, the original 2016 GEO-GNOME Work Plan was revised with a view to consolidating tasks. In order to further refine and bring the work plan to fruition during 2018-2019, it was necessary to jointly review the GEO-GNOME work plan with active participants of the GEO-GNOME effort, as well as others identified as having key expertise on the subject matter. During the three-day Status and Scoping Workshop in Bern, the focus of the discussions lay in the spatial and thematic needs for mountain observation data and the role of GEO-GNOME in curating and making this data available. It was decided that all GEO-GNOME work should be legitimated by policy information needs. GEO-GNOME should operate at two levels: 1) communicating the global importance of mountains and the need for mountain-specific working instruments and data resources, and promoting GEO-GNOME work and products; and 2) providing mountain observation data and knowledge to meet the policy information needs. GEO-GNOME will
improve the data delivery by providing a clean metadata catalogue via its GEOSS portal, currently in beta; by ensuring the collection of meaningful new data by establishing a global network for elevation transects; and by producing a new data layer capturing socio-ecological aspects. The key output and outcome of this workshop was the revised work plan, with planned actions flagged such as two targeted GEO-GNOME workshops in 2019.