The International Tundra Experiment is a network of researchers examining the impacts of climate change on tundra vegetation throughout the Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine regions of the world. The goals of the networks are to document, understand and forecast changes in the tundra biome. Most members of the network do research at sites established in the early 1990s using standardized measurement protocols and a common warming experiment. The power of the network allows researchers to pool their data and make statements about the fate of the tundra biome as a whole. The four main areas of activity as part of the International Polar Year are: 1 vegetation change; 2 changes in the timing of key biological events (phenology); 3 changes in nutrient cycling; and 4 changes in carbon balance. Each of these areas is described below with a photograph and caption.

The goal of ELOKA is to facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and knowledge of the Arctic by providing data management and user support, and to foster collaboration between local and international researchers. Over the last decade, Arctic residents and indigenous peoples have been increasingly involved in, and taking control of, research. Through Local and Traditional Knowledge (LTK) research and community-based monitoring, Arctic communities have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to understanding recent environmental change.

POLENET will deploy an ambitious array of geophysical instruments across the polar regions in order to study the complex interplay between climate, ice sheets, geodynamics, and global sea level change. POLENET geodetic and seismic observations, paired with other types of geophysical measurements, will greatly improve our understanding of high latitude Earth systems. This international collaboration of 24 countries will involve scientists, students and educators at all levels, and will further advance our capability to deploy autonomous instruments in extreme environments

Antarctica is the primary heat sink in the global climate system: it plays an important role in climate change and variability, and Antarctic atmospheric processes affect the rest of the planet via the atmosphere and the sea. Using satellites and the state-of-the-art HIAPER research aircraft, AC Squared will help scientists gain a better understanding of how these processes work – knowledge that is essential if we are to develop models that more accurately predict global climate change.

The proposed activity aims at establishing a bipolar network to obtain data needed to quantify properties of aerosols at high latitudes, including seasonal background concentrations by measurements of aerosol optical depth (AOD), spectral characterizations, and the evolutionary patterns of the natural and anthropogenic processes that perturb the aerosol cycles. An effort to quantify direct and indirect climate forcing by polar aerosols will be made through a set of closure experiments using observations in conjunction with model calculation and satellite data.

Internationally Coordinated Studies on Antarctic Environmental Status , Biodiversity and Ecosystems EBESA will study the effects of climatic and environmental changes, and the impact of man-made contaminants, on organisms and ecosystems of northern Victoria Land, James Ross Island, and Patagonia. We intend to establish possible sources, deposition patterns, and biological effects of persistant pollutants. We will also collect key organisms, such as moss and lichens, in order to study their origin and evolutionary response to different climate and environment.

SIKU is one of several IPY 2007–2008 projects aimed at documenting indigenous observations of environmental changes in the polar areas, with its specific focus on sea ice and the use of ice-covered habitats by the residents of the Arctic. Incidentally, the project’s acronym SIKU is also the most common word for sea ice (siku) in all Eskimo/Inuit languages, from Chukotka to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. As a collaborative international initiative, SIKU brings anthropologists, human geographers, sea ice and climate scientists, marine and ecosystem biologists from the U.S., Canada, Russia, Greenland, and France in partnership with almost two dozen indigenous communities in Alaska, Arctic Canada, the Russian Chukchi Peninsula, and Greenland. SIKU, like many IPY 2007–2008 projects, is organized as a consortium of local or national initiatives with their respective budgets provided by the national funding agencies. Presently, the main operational components of the SIKU initiative are the Inuit Sea Ice Use and Occupancy Project (ISIUOP) in Canada (see summary report on the ISIUOP activities), the Alaska-Chukotkan portion of SIKU made of several local efforts (see field reports by Nicole Stuckenberger and Josh Wisniewski), and the Greenlandic component that is being developed as a part of the continuing SILA-Inuk project administered by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC)-Greenland office in Nuuk. Recently, a small French team secured its funding to join the SIKU initiative and to conduct sea ice knowledge studies in Greenland.

ESSAR addresses how climate variability and change affects the marine ecosystems of the polar (Subarctic and Arctic) seas and their sustainability. To provide accurate projections on the impact of climate warming on these ecosystems requires improved knowledge of its components and their linkages. Because of the complexity of the interactions, accurate predictions of what will happen to individual species requires knowledge on key life-history traits and of what will happen to the ecosystem as a whole, as species do not function separately from their ecosystem. ESSAR, therefore, encompasses retrospective and field studies on physics, plankton, benthos, fish and shellfish, marine mammals, sea birds and humans. The field studies will be carried out in the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans during 2007-2008. The data gathered will be used, together with bio-physical models, to make quantifiable predictions of the effects of both climate variability and long-term climate change on arctic polar marine ecosystems.

Collecting oceanographic data from ice-filled polar waters is costly and logistically challenging. Rather than relying solely on human scientists, this project uses beluga whales and four seal species as ocean explorers to collect information about the conductivity (salinity), temperature and depth (CTD) of Arctic and Antarctic waters. By fitting state-of-the-art CTD tags on dozens of these deep-diving marine mammals, scientists will be able to gather a rich new data set that will extend our knowledge of the world's oceans as well as the top predators that live in them. MEOP will provide a unique source of fundamental physical and biological data from the polar oceans. Its unique approach will compliment efforts in many other IPY projects and will leave a legacy of useful biological and ocean data along with new approaches to understanding the interaction between marine predators and their ecosystem.