"A meeting from us for us!" SPP SeaLevel Early Career Scientists Meeting
Following the 2nd annual meeting of the DFG SPP-1889 “Regional Sea Level Change and Society” (SeaLevel) on 19th-21st March, another successful and highly stimulating meeting dedicated exclusively to the Early Career Researchers (ECS) of the program took also place at the Institute of Oceanography, CEN, University of Hamburg, on 22nd -23rd March.
The 2-day meeting, initiated by the SPP SeaLevel ECS community itself with the motto “a meeting from us for us”, brought together PhD students and postdocs from the social and natural sciences to present their individual research work inside each SPP project, reinforcing interactions with each other and integration within the SPP community.
The meeting served as a great opportunity to understand each other’s research to a more fundamental level, providing “down to the basics” information and thus building on background knowledge, which is essential for obtaining both a wider overview and a deeper understanding into the diverse natural, socio-politico-economic and cultural aspects of the sea level research field and the interdisciplinary character of the SPP SeaLevel itself. In turn, this enabled the ECS to better perceive the involvement of their own work within the whole SPP SeaLevel program as well.
Benefiting from the expertise of SPP Principal Investigators (PIs), the ECS meeting further included lectures on key sea level topics. Jochen Hinkel (Global Climate Forum, Potsdam), PI at the SEASCApe Baltic project, discussed to what extent the coastal societies are able to adapt to sea level rise, and what kind of sea level information are required for coastal adaptation and risk management, while Tilo Schöne (German Research Centre for Geosciences-Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (GFZ)), PI at the SEASchange and CoRSEA projects, the gave a lecture on measuring sea level with different tools and getting a consistent reference frame.
In addition, guest speakers from the Department for Roads, Bridges and Waterways (LSBG) talked about storm surges and flood protection strategies and accompanied the ECS participants for an excursion to the flood protection sides in Hamburg, offering a more thorough insight into the range of storm surge needs, designs and approaches.
Moreover, Patrick Wagner, PhD student in the SPP IndoArcipel project, demonstrated a practical exercise on GIT version control software, while the comprehensive agenda of the meeting also included a lecture on writing and presentation skills for interdisciplinary topics and audience from a corpus linguist guest speaker (Uni-Birmingham, UK).