Introduction: Mountains of Our Future Earth— Perth 2015

From 5 to 8 October 2015, 400 people from 52 countries on 6 continents attended the international conference “Mountains of Our Future Earth” in Perth, Scotland. The event was organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in sustainable development at the Centre for Mountain Studies (CMS) at Perth College, University of the Highlands and Islands, together with 2 global organizations: the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) and the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA). This editorial introduces the conference and the papers in this special issue, which are based on presentations given during the conference. The present issue of MRD concludes with an evaluation of the conference and consequent recommendations for future research.

The mountain context and the Future Earth Agenda The context of all 3 conferences has been similar.Mountain areas occupy 22% of the Earth's land surface; they are home to 13% of the global population, and another 14% live in their immediate proximity.Globally, these areas are vital sources of water for agricultural, industrial, and domestic use.They include major centers of biodiversity, often coinciding with centers of cultural diversity where traditional ecological knowledge is maintained.In an urbanizing world, mountain areas are key locations for tourism and recreation; some include major urban areas.
Mountain systems are particularly fragile and subject to both natural and anthropogenic drivers of change.These range from volcanic and seismic events and flooding to global climate change and the loss of vegetation and soils because of inappropriate agricultural and forestry practices and extractive industries.Thus, many mountain ecosystems are moving along trajectories that couple high rates of environmental change with strong economic changes.The collective effect of these changes may be to alter the ability of mountain ecosystems to provide critical goods and services to both mountain and lowland populations.The vital linkages between mountain and lowland systems are increasingly recognized in global and regional policy debates and action, most recently in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Within this broad context, the title ''Mountains of Our Future Earth'' was chosen to underline the intention for the conference to contribute to the global Future Earth program, a 10-year international research initiative that will develop the knowledge for responding effectively to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change and supporting transformation toward global sustainability in the coming decades.GMBA is a Core Project of Future Earth and MRI is a Sustaining Partner.As described later, the conference as a whole was structured around the 3 Research Themes of Future Earth.The connection to Future Earth was further ensured by the participation of Dennis Ojima, director of the Colorado Hub of Future Earth, and the topic of the final plenary panel discussion: ''Future Earth-An agenda for R&D from a mountain perspective.''Aims, process, and structure of Perth III ''Mountains of Our Future Earth'' had 3 aims: 1.To present, evaluate, and synthesize progress in our understanding of global change in mountain regions, and share examples of innovative approaches, particularly in terms of progress toward addressing the gaps in global research in mountain regions noted in 2010 (Bj€ ornsen Gurung et al 2012); 2. To refine and agree on agendas for collaborative research and action relating to global change and mountain regions and to significantly increase the use of applied research findings on the ground in mountain regions; 3. To foster effective interdisciplinary and international interactions between participants-researchers, practitioners, and policy makers-including specific opportunities to strengthen ongoing research activities and to foster new collaborations-thematic and/or regional.
As in 2010, a key to the success of the conference was that 18 months before the conference, experts working on a wide range of themes within both the social and natural sciences were requested to organize a session related to their interests.These experts included people who had chaired sessions at Perth II as well as other experts in the MRI database.All proposals were accepted, some with modifications, usually to widen the scope of the session.It is notable that only 10 chairs from Perth II proposed sessions, so that the range of session topics at Perth III was quite different.
Each session organizer was asked to identify the Research Theme(s) of Future Earth (2014) to which their session would contribute: 1. Dynamic Planet: Observing, explaining, understanding, projecting Earth, environmental, and societal system trends, drivers, and processes and their interactions; anticipating global thresholds and risks.2. Global Sustainable Development: Knowledge for sustainable, secure, and fair stewardship of biodiversity, food, water, health, energy, materials, and other ecosystem services.3. Transformation Toward Sustainability: Understanding transformation processes and options; assessing how these relate to human values, emerging technologies, and social and economic development pathways; and evaluating strategies for governing and managing the global environment across sectors and scales.
This structure enabled the global change research community working in mountain areas to align itself more easily with the broader global change research framework established by Future Earth.
Prospective participants could submit their abstracts for oral or poster presentations to 35 research presentation sessions and 15 roundtables.In total, 624 abstracts were submitted.Of these submissions, 292 were accepted for presentation in 46 parallel sessions, 35 for presentation in 7 parallel roundtables, and 81 for the poster session.
Perth III included 7 plenary presentations, compared with 10 in 2010, in order to maximize opportunities for participants to present and discuss their own research.Although the numbers of participants and countries represented were slightly less than in 2010, the conference was truly international, with more participants from Switzerland (51) than the host country (48); there were also 48 participants from the United States.The conference was also highly interdisciplinary, with a larger proportion of participants from social science disciplines than in 2010, as discussed in the final article of this Special Issue.Beyond the sessions themselves, the aim of fostering opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions was achieved particularly through field trips to different parts of the Highlands on the day before the conference, which were attended by more than half of the participants; a long poster session; and many social events.
As in 2010, the conference organizers used a structured process to capture the insights of participants throughout the meeting.These insights provided the basis for a draft synthesis and recommendations presented during the final plenary as well as for the article by Gleeson et al, the final article in this Special Issue (Gleeson et al 2016).The keynote presentations and the final plenary session and roundtable may be viewed at http://mri.scnatweb.ch/en/events/2015-01-29-07-56-51;blogs about the parallel sessions can be found at https:// perthmountains2015.wordpress.com/.The abstracts of all the presentations at the conference are available from the CMS.

Contributions to this Special Issue
All of the articles in the first 3 sections-MountainDevelopment, MountainResearch, and MountainAgenda-derive from presentations at Perth III and have been peer-reviewed.They give a flavor of the diversity of presentations at the conference; all align with one or more of the Research Themes of Future Earth.
In the MountainDevelopment section, the first article presents an innovative approach developed by Sanseverino et al for use in Canada's Mountain West to explore changes in mountain environments using archival and recent images; the software tool is now geared to accept comparison of photos from other mountain regions in the world.In the next article, Mathez-Stiefel et al outline a 4-step approach, using a combination of participatory tools and ethnographical and botanical methods, to identify and analyze suitable agroforestry gender-sensitive options in the Peruvian Andes.The third article, by Imperiale and Vanclay, focuses on how to strengthen community resilience using social impact assessment.Their case study is the Tratturo Magno path in the Italian Apennines, an area that suffered severe damage during the 2009 earthquake.While each of these articles focuses on a specific mountain area, the methods they present all have far wider applicability.
In the MountainResearch section, the first article considers seedling regeneration in the alpine treeline ecotone of the Pacific Northwest of the United States.Johnson and Yeakley conclude that seedlings benefit from wood microsites, as they have a greater water content-a finding that may be of relevance in many other mountain areas as climates become warmer and drier.This is followed by 2 articles on ecosystem services (ES the Pentland Hills prefer nature-oriented management; in urban areas, leisure-oriented management is valued highest.The next article addresses another aspect of visiting mountain areas: visitors' use of energy.Using the example of Alpbach in the Austrian Alps, Unger et al apply a geographic information system-based tool to provide an in-depth view of the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of tourism-related traffic.Tourism is closely related to amenity migration, and the next article, by L€ offler et al, investigates this phenomenon using case studies from the Italian Alps.They apply 2 models that address both the dynamics of in-migration and its diverse impacts.
Migration is also the theme of the next article, by Jaquet et al.Their focus is the Harpan watershed in the Middle Hills of Nepal, which has experienced substantial outmigration, both internationally and to lower altitudes.This has led to changes in land cover at higher altitudes as well as to increased exposure to flooding at lower altitudes.The final article in this section also comes from Asia, where Zhumanova et al explore the decision-making of farmers in Kyrgyzstan with regard to herd size and land use.They find complex interactions between these issues and also note that the infrastructure provided by pasture committees is somewhat ineffective and can even worsen pasture condition.This leads to recommendations for improving the situation.
Each of the 3 articles in the MountainAgenda section has a global focus.Strachan et al outline the challenges of developing mountain climate observatories and how to address these using a combination of gradient monitoring, uniform observational standards, and modern technology.On a related theme, Flint highlights the challenges of integrating social science paradigms into the Global Network of Mountain Observatories (GNOMO).She proposes a multiparadigmatic, multimethod approach to ensure that this network fully represents the socialecological dimensions of dynamic mountain systems.Finally, Gleeson et al present an analysis of the presentations and participants at the Perth III conference, and outline a proposal for future mountain research.This links to the first article of the MountainPlatform section, on the MRI, which is followed by an overview of the activities of the CMS.
Other publications emerging from Perth III -A special issue of Regional Environmental Change, with the tentative title ''Past legacies and future challenges for land use and land cover change (LULCC) in mountainous regions,'' edited by Janine Bolliger, Urs Gimmi, Thomas Houet, and Jacek Kozak; -An issue of the Scottish Geographical Journal on biocultural diversity, edited by Will Tuladhar-Douglas.
Two further publications associated with Perth III were the Autumn 2015 issues of, first, The Geographer, the newsletter of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, on Scottish mountains (http://rsgs.org/exploring-geography/publications/geographer-archive/);and, second, Mountain Views Vol 9, Issue 2, the newsletter of the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (CIRMOUNT), with reflections on the conference from many participants (http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/publications/mtnviews.shtml).
Martin F. Price 1 *, Gregory B. Greenwood 2 **, and Eva M. Spehn 3 *** * martin.price@perth.uhi.ac.uk ** green@giub.unibe.ch*** eva.spehn@ips.unibe.The international conference ''Mountains of Our Future Earth,'' held in Perth, Scotland, from 5 to 8 October 2015, was organized by the following partners: The following organizations sponsored the conference: The Conference was also supported by: Editorial ch 1 Director and Chairholder, UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Mountain Development, Centre for Mountain Studies, Perth College, University of the Highlands and Islands, Crieff Road, Perth PH1 2NX, United Kingdom 2 Executive Director, Mountain Research Initiative, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, 3012-CH Bern, Switzerland 3 Executive Director, Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment, Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, 3013-CH Bern, Switzerland In addition to this Special Issue of MRD, Mountain Research and Development 37(2), May 2017-guest edited by Georg Gratzer and Willian Keeton-will include papers presented at Perth III on ''Mountain Forests and the SDGs: Challenges and Potentials for Fulfilling the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.'' (Salzmann et al 2016)od 2017)s based on presentations at Perth III are also in preparation or have already appeared:-Mountain Ice and Water: Investigations of the Hydrologic Cycle in Alpine Environments(Schroder and Greenwood 2017); -Climate Change Adaptation Strategies-An Upstream-Downstream Perspective(Salzmann et al 2016);