US-Southern Africa Workshop: Synthesis of SAFARI 2000 -- Implications for Local and Regional Science and Policy, Charlottesville, VA, October 2002

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0221350SwapThis award supports 15 African participants in a US-Southern Africa Workshop on "Synthesis of SAFARI 2000 - Implications for Local and Regional Science and Policy," scheduled for October 8-13, 2002, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The co-organizers are Professor Robert Swap, with the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Professor Harold Annegarn, with the Atmosphere and Energy Group at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. There will be a total of about 150 participants, approximately one third of whom will come from US academic institutions, one third from various countries in Southern Africa, and the remainder from governmental, nongovernmental and international organizations. This workshop will enable the researchers to synthesize and interpret valuable information from the Southern African Regional Science Initiative (known as SAFARI 2000), and to also plan the next phase of regional environmental research. It is expected that this meeting will lead to the development of collaborative, interdisciplinary research and education projects.SAFARI 2000 was an international science project to investigate the linkages across time and space scales between Southern Africa's terrestrial, atmospheric, and biogeochemical processes, and their impacts on regional and global environmental change. The project involved nearly 300 participants from 18 different countries. This workshop will enable participants, some of whom are US and African students and junior investigators, to review the current state of understanding about and missing information on land-atmosphere-biosphere interactions concerning Southern Africa, and explore emerging areas of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research that will advance the knowledge on the natural functioning of Southern Africa's ecosystems. They will also participate in the process for translating the research results into a format that is relevant to society. A synthesis of the results of SAFARI 2000 will be produced in a workshop report, thus providing valuable new information to the international global environmental change community, as well as to local and regional policy makers. Results will also be disseminated through professional journal articles and via a web site.The Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Atmospheric Sciences, and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences jointly support this award.