Call for help in raising awareness of the impact of climate change.
Our mission is to make the latest climate impact research accessible to the public. We are looking for help regarding the translation of our scientific papers into ISIpedia visualisations, videos or other formats that are easily accessible to the public. As we are scientists, we may not have the best feeling of what is easily understandable to the public and it would be great to collaborate with the experts in science communication.
We invite you to join authoring teams to distill the socially relevant messages from their scientific publications into ISIpedia articles that will enable citizens, stakeholders, and policymakers to make informed decisions in the face of climate change. Articles could provide relevant information about future risks, address observed changes in natural or human systems and their attribution to climate change, but also provide information about recent advances in these processes.
ISIpedia is quite diverse in terms of formats. For example, each scientific article to be translated for ISIpedia could become a small project where you could work with an author (or small group of authors) to ensure a good translation. Below you find a list of papers or other contributions we would like to integrate into the website and where the scientists behind have already expressed their interest in the collaboration with you as the communication experts. Feel free to contact the editorial team if you were interested to help with one of these projects. Then we will put you in contact with the authors!
We look forward to hearing your ideas!
If you are planning to contribute to ISIpedia or have any questions, please email the editorial team at isipedia.editorial.team@pik-potsdam.de.
Papers to be translated to an ISIpedia article
Human impact parameterizations in global hydrological models improve estimates of monthly discharges and hydrological extremes: a multimodel validation study
Veldkamp et al. (2018) Environmental Research Letters, 13, 055008. http://edoc.gfz-potsdam.de/pik/get/8049/0/7e33f93e4cf13a2a79f35cf1dc45e087/8049oa.pdf
Short summary of the study: It is known that human activity has a profound influence on river discharges, hydrological extremes, and water-related hazards. In this study, Veldkamp et al. compared the performance of five state-of-the-art global hydrological models (GHMs) with observations (1971–2010) to examine the role of human impact parameterizations (HIP) in the simulation of monthly discharge and hydrological extremes on a global scale.
The authors found that the inclusion of HIP improves the performance of the GHMs, both in managed and near-natural catchments, although the level of improvement and the reasons for it vary greatly. This is due to the relative importance of the timing of return flows and reservoir operations as well as their associated uncertainties, thus the model performance is still not optimal.
This highlights the need for further research linking human management and hydrological domains, especially in those areas in which human impacts are dominant. The large variation in performance between GHMs, regions and performance indicators, calls for a careful selection of GHMs, model components and evaluation metrics in future model applications.
Detection and Attribution of observed impacts - a global map
We would like to develop ISIpedia into a monitoring system for observed impacts of climate change. In many cases, the impacts of climate change may be masked by additional changes in socio-economic systems and it needs process-based climate impact models or statistical approaches to separate the impacts of climate change from direct human forcing such as increasing water withdrawal induced by growing populations.
As a starting point of our “detection and attribution” category, we would like to provide an overview of processes that are already influenced (glacier retreat, sea-level rise, and associated coastal flooding, shifts in vegetation types and phenology, loss of ecosystems such as coral reefs, etc.) by climate change. Such that the user could click on one of the illustrations to find all the related studies that are relevant to a specific country. It would be great to get your help to develop a Figure or illustration of the processes that are already affected by e.g. a “with climate change” versus “without climate change” map.