Rationale

The CEON stakeholder community has developed the following rationale that underpins development of CEON:

• Relative to other regions on the globe, the Arctic is experiencing dramatic changes in climate and patterns of human land use. Environmental and socioeconomic drivers associated with these changes originate both within and outside of the Arctic system.
• Change detection & predictive power of these changes is low and are limited/ threatened by the lack of sustained environmental observation time series in northern high latitudes.
• A circum-arctic environmental observatories network that can provide adequate, diverse and sustained time series observations has the potential to dramatically improve our understanding of the Arctic system and how it may continue to respond to a variety of environmental and societal changes forecast for the region.
• There is a well-established science infrastructure and a tremendous amount of research and monitoring ongoing in the Arctic. Generally, the broader international and multidisciplinary impacts of these efforts are not fully tapped due to limitations associated with research exposure, communication, data availability, and differences in technologies and sampling methods between sites. Reinforcing and improving the broader impacts of existing and planned activities is the primary focus of CEON at present.