The Arctic coastal zone is sensitive to changes in marine, atmospheric, and terrestrial systems. Variations in sea ice extent, wave and storm intensity, air and water temperatures, and ground ice content affect the rate and magnitude of coastal change. A very sparsely populated region, the Arctic coastline is poorly observed when compared to temperate and tropical coastal zones, despite the fact that human systems in the Arctic are located in and dependent on processes in the coastal zone. The Arctic coastal zone needs to be monitored, both as a barometer for global change and for its human relevance. The international effort to align coastal observations in the Arctic is led by the Arctic Circumpolar Coastal Observatory Network (ACCO-Net). ACCO-Net includes a network of key sites setup by the Arctic Coastal Dynamics (ACD) project of the IASC, and 17 International Polar Year (IPY) projects from around the Arctic. ACCO-Net provides three categories of support to an SAON: 1) a network of regional experts responsible for running observations; 2) historical and current data in an Arctic circumpolar GIS database; and 3) a catalogue of site characteristics based on remotely sensed products. The regional experts have been assembled through IASC’s Arctic Coastal Dynamics project, and through the IPY project cluster on Arctic coastal observatories, which ACCO-Net leads. The coastal database is currently available in beta form, and includes a segmentation and classification of the circumpolar Arctic coastline. The current coastline used is the World Vector Shoreline, which has been divided into over 8000 segments on the basis of geomorphology, coastline position change rate, and ground composition, as well as other parameters. The GIS format allows searching and querying, and the database is currently mounted as an internet map server. The catalogue of site characteristics has two principle aspects: i) a monitoring template describing the primary and secondary monitoring parameters for each observatory site, and including links to standard operating procedures for each, and ii) standardized coastline position and digital elevation models for each observatory site, based on optical and infrared satellite data collected during IPY as part of the European Space Agency’s IPY program. ACCO-Net partner projects are currently selecting imagery for the catalogue and will co-ordinate their activities via a series of workshops supported by the International Space Science Institute.

LICHEN focuses on the languages and cultures of the northern circumpolar region. Faced with minority languages, governments have pursued policies of assimilation. This has applied to indigenous languages in Canada, to Gaelic and Scots in Scotland, and to Finnic minority languages in the Circumpolar region. The aim of the project is to create an electronic framework for the collection, management, online display, and exploitation of existing corpora of the languages of the circumpolar regions, which is also applicable to other corpora that represent regional, social and other varieties of languages.

The Network for ARCtic Climate and Biological DIVersity Studies (ARCDIV) is a multidisciplinary international research initiative. The project explores the diversity of ecosystem on Arctic archipelago Svalbard, central part of Isfjorden, Billefjorden and Petuniabukta, by integrating existing and new intensive measurements of key biological and physical variables and processes.

ICASS VI occurred in Nuuk, Greenland 22 - 26 August, 2008. The theme was “Arctic Social Sciences: Prospects for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 Era and Beyond”. The Conference website provides excellent links to abstracts and a solid overview of the breadth of social science and humanities research in IPY.

The recently observed changes in the Arctic are caused by interaction of multiple factors and already significantly impact people and ecosystems. For example, changes in biodiversity, land use, increased natural resource exploitation, and marine transportation are closely interlinked with social, cultural and economic activities. Significant pressure on the environment caused by human activities on all spatial scales will lead to further, probably larger, changes in the future. Thus, understanding the interaction of the human and environmental domains in the Arctic and their interplay with globe processes are the major focal points of the ISAC study.

DAMOCLES (Developing Arctic Modeling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies) is an integrated ice-atmosphere-ocean monitoring and forecasting system designed for observing, understanding and quantifying climate changes in the Arctic. DAMOCLES is specifically concerned with the potential for a significantly reduced sea ice cover, and the impacts this might have on the environment and on human activities, both regionally and globally.

We know that the Arctic exerts a critical influence on the Earth's climate and has done so for millions of years. Locked in Arctic ice and sediments are vital records of what the Earth's environment was like in the past. To more accurately predict the future of the Earth's climate, we need to know more about the extremes. Finding out how hot and how cold the Earth was in the past, and how much, as well as how little of it was covered by ice are key questions that APEX hopes to help answer.

The overall goal of this initiative is to advance our knowledge of climate warming in the Arctic, by studying past climate change. We will focus mainly on the ocean circulation and climate of the NW Eurasian continental margin. The present climate in the Arctic shows signs of rapid change with decreasing sea ice cover and increasing temperature of the Atlantic Water. The implications of this warming are highly uncertain, as modelling experiments projecting temperatures for the next 100 years show a largescatter at high northern latitudes.

Sámi -- their lives and culture -- have been depicted as objects throughout history both in images and texts. This project explores representations of Sámi made by four prominent nineteenth-century researchers who travelled in the north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and to Spetsbergen. Working in Sweden, these scientits (Göran Wahlenberg (1780-1851), Lars Levi Læstadius (1800-1861), Sven Lovén (1809-1895) and Axel Hamberg (1863-1933)) had degrees in or did research in geology, botany, ocenography and zoology.

Within natural science at that time, "objectifiation" was quite common: researchers identified, mapped and explained plants, animals, rock, snow, glaciers, weather conditions such as snow and wind. Sámi were similary objectified in the researchers' writings. Nevertheless were the researchers sometimes interested in the knowledge the Sámi had and also used them as reindeer herders when transporting the researchers and their equipment, when going animal hunting, or used them as guides.

The result of the field science the researchers carried out was the foundation of new scholarly fields; a natural scientific Sámi anthropology and a natural scientific Sámi ethnography. Even if the scholarly fields were new -- it was not that common for natural scientists to do research on Sámi -- much of the so-called knowledge about the Sámi within theses fields was based on references to art, missionaries' and priests' descriptions of Sámi, and even from the Icelandic sagas. Thus the natural scientists constructed an image, a representation, of Sámi or even a Sámi culture that was based on older representations of the Sámi. This process was linked to the industrialisation in Sweden where forests, minings and water power were developed. Science developed at the same time as a tool for this industrialisation explotation. Thus the new scholarly fields with Sámi as research objects became a part of that Swedish-Nordic colonisation of the North."