Bonn IPC meeting

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Minutes from MADCAP meeting – IPC Bonn, 03/09/2008

The following people were present: Heather Binney, Simon Brewer, Basil Davis, Ralph Fyfe, Graciela Gil-Romera, Thomas Giesecke, Norbert Kühl, Michelle Leydet

The National Contact group is currently organising an up-to-date list of contact addresses. This will be sent to Michelle, who will contact all contributors who have restricted sites to request that they are made unrestricted. Sheila Hicks and Rachid Cheddadi are writing the letter to ask for this change. We should add a third option to ask if restricted sites can be used in the mapping project. So, the contributors will be offered 3 choices:

1. Make site unrestricted
2. Keep site restricted, but allow use in mapping
3. Keep site restricted

Heather to contact Sheila and Rachid.

Basil advised that the chronology group has not yet met, and so no clear protocol is in place for new chronologies. For sites where we have identified problems with the chronologies, we agreed that it would be useful if we can suggest a new age-depth model. If the problem cannot be resolved with a new chronology, it will be excluded from the mapping. New chronologies should be sent directly to Michelle.

A second point will be to establish a ‘MADCAP’ set of chronologies to use in this work, and which will be stored in the EPD for future use. Ralph has suggested that these chronologies should be limited, i.e. the samples outside of the dating limits given in the excel spreadsheet should be excluded.

Michelle has the full set of corrections and is working through these at the moment. When these first corrections are complete, Simon will produce a set of taxa maps for initial checking, etc. This will probably be in early 2009.

At the last meeting, it was agreed that a biodiversity project would form the main scientific aim of the group. As this is likely to take some time, suggestions were made for other projects. These projects would run in parallel, and may provide results before the biodiversity project. The four suggestions are listed here, with a contact name. People who are interested in any of the projects should contact the listed person. Biomes, with focus on EPD sites (and region) – Heather Europe AD (over last 2000 years) – Thomas No-analogue vegetation and climate – Simon Spread of Neolithic – Walter

The current state of the VHA article was discussed. The intention is to complete the paper by adding a short description of the decisions taken during the EPD meeting on Thursday. The paper will be left on the wiki for approximately two months for corrections and changes and then will be resubmitted to VHA. At this point, a check will be made to see if all contributing authors on the wiki are included as co-authors.

There was also some discussion about how to avoid the problems that occurred with the VHA article. The suggestions included:

1. Deadlines for replies to emails
2. Nominated responsible for each task
3. Allow more time!

Regrettably, Ann Le Flao has stopped her PhD and left research. Odile Peyron has expressed an interest in taking over the French sites. I would like to include Ann as an author, at least on the first publication as she has done a lot of work on the French sites.

MADCAP and the advisory board. The administrative structure of the EPD will change as of the end of this year to a chairman plus an advisory board, which will consist of a spokesperson from each of the support groups. We will therefore need a representative. Any volunteers?