News from Baltic Earth
Posted by Dr. Marcus Reckermann, International Baltic Earth Secretariat
8th Baltic Earth Summer School on the Swedish island of Askö
On 22-29 August 2022, for the 8th time, the international Baltic Earth summer school on the “Climate of the Baltic Sea region” took place at the research station in the Swedish archipelago. 13 students from various institutions around the Baltic Sea learned about past and future changes in the climate of the Baltic Sea region. The students were introduced to fundamental processes with relevance for the climate system in the atmosphere, ocean, sea-ice and on land. A holistic Earth System approach was presented while the focus of the course is on the physical aspects of changing climate. In addition to lectures, tutorials, exercises and literature studies, students had the opportunity to discuss the learned topics further during group exercises. This time, teachers were recruited from Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Geesthacht, Stockholm University and Leibniz Institute of Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde.
Academic learning is just one side of the benefits of such a summer school: here, master and phD students from different countries and academic fields come together to live, learn and have fun together for a full week on a beautiful island in the Baltic Sea. Lifelong scientific collaborations and personal friendships thrive here in an open international environment. That is a tremendous benefit of international summer schools. We are proud and happy to be catalysts of the international and interdisciplinary networking!
The summer school was organized in cooperation and co-funded by Leibniz-Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, Rostock University and Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon. The Summer School was hosted by Askö Laboratory of Stockholm University, Baltic Sea Centre.
Bildergalerie
BEAR papers exceptionally well received by the scientific community
The BEAR reports (Baltic Earth Assessment Reports) are a series of review papers on the major Earth system topics in the Baltic Sea region. They span from salinity dynamics and biogeochemistry, human impacts and regional modeling to a summary of the current knowledge of climate change in the region. As such, they are also successors to the so-called BACC books of 2008 and 2015. However, the BEARs cover a wider range of topics and are now published in Earth System Dynamics (ESD) as Open Access.
But how do you measure the success of a scientific paper? Journals have their statistics. ESD uses principally two metrics: the number of downloads and the so-called Altimetric Attention Score, which approximates the interest in (social) media. In both indices, the BEAR papers are very successful. Two BEAR papers are among the three most downloaded ESD papers of the last 12 months, and five of the ten BEAR papers are in the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric to date. The paper “Human impacts and their interactions in the Baltic Sea region” by Hereon´s Marcus Reckermann et al. is currently the most downloaded ESD paper of the past 12 months. Congratulations and thank you for the effort!
