Three members of SIOS-KC, and our chairman Kim Holmén, attended the Svalbard Science Conference at Fornebu near Oslo from 6 - 8 November 2017. It was a great opportunity to meet and talk to many people in the Svalbard science community, make new contacts, and inform others about the newest developments within SIOS.

In September and October, SIOS provided training sessions on data management for three research groups that had gathered for workshops, funded through the Strategic Grant Call by Svalbard Science Forum. The workshops were held in Longyearbyen and Sicily by Øystein Godøy and Lara Ferrighi, respectively. Both are employed at Met.no and heavily involved in SIOS Data Management.

Have you been in the field and collected data but not had the time to analyse them? Or would you like to harmonise existing data sets? Would you like your data sets to be considered SIOS core data? The State of Environmental Science in Svalbard (SESS) report will be an annual publication in which long-term monitoring on Svalbard is discussed with a focus on interactions between different Earth System Science parameters. Funding is now available for contributions to the first SESS report.