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The newly-formed Mountain Resilience Working Group originated following an MRI-funded synthesis workshop titled ’Towards a Mountain Resilience Report: Regenerating Mountain Systems by Systemic Innovation’ last September 2019, whose aim was to design and develop a ‘Mountain Resilience Report’ (MRR) for mountain regions. 

To kick off their term, the newly appointed 2020-2021 SLC members will get together with the MRI Board and Coordination Office near Geneva on March 4 – 6 where they will discuss the direction of MRI’s current and future activities. Input from you, the MRI community, will help shape this meeting as well as the future opportunities and endeavors of both our network and the mountain research community as a whole. 

 On 11 December 2019, the ‘network-of-networks’ in the Latin American region Conéctate-A+ -  the Cluster of Cooperation (CLOC) in the Tropical Andes-Central America region (Andes+) - held its second meeting to put forward a roadmap for collaboration, as well as coordinate a plan to implement key activities and milestones to be reached in 2020, including a call for grant proposals in early February. 

In November 2019, MRI joined forces with Interdisciplinary Center for Mountain Research (CIRM) and Forum Landscape, Alps, Parks (FoLAP) to invite researchers to discuss transformative research and education on mountains at the 17th Swiss Geoscience Meeting. The symposium 20. 'Taking Stock of Transformative Research & Education on Mountains. What Future Avenues?' was convened by Iago Otero & Emmanuel Reynard (CIRM and Uni Lausanne), Carolina Adler (MRI) and Jörg Balsiger (MRI and FoLAP).

MRI’s Science Leadership Council (SLC) is composed of renowned key contributors to research on mountain regions and whose collaboration and expertise are essential for shaping MRI’s strategy and driving forward its vision. With the guidance from and engagement with the MRI Chair Jörg Balsiger, MRI Co-PIs, and the Executive Director, the MRI SLC members for 2020-2021 have been selected and appointed.

The western Peruvian Coastal Range depends on ecosystem services from several mountain catchments, including the Cañete River which provides water for energy, agriculture and housing from both the El Platanal hydroelectric plant and the Capillucas reservoir.

While it is known that changing precipitation patterns, including more heavy rainfall, due to climate change may increase the concentration of silt in storage reservoirs like the Capillucas reservoir, potentially endangering the livelihood of the surrounding community, the extent of the damage is not yet known.

As climate change redefines the landscape of high mountain environments, so changes the scope – and its limitations – of summertime mountaineering in the Alps.

While sunnier weather and warmer temperatures lead to a rise in certain nature-based tourism, such as visiting natural parks and camping, they are causing the crysophere to melt, leading to more frequent and intense gravitational processes (such as rockfall), creating an increasingly dangerous setting for mountaineers.

Identifying and conserving ecosystems in protected area networks are top priorities for the conservation science community. The macroscale global ecoregions maps commonly in use today describe large ecologically meaningful areas, but not distinct localized ecosystems at the occurrence (patch) level, potentially leaving ecosystems at risk of being left out of conservation efforts.

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