The proposed European-US and South American network IMCONet will advance climate and (eco-) system change research at the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), a region of recent rapid aerial warming. WAP glaciers tribute to global sea level rise, and functioning and services of coastal ecosystems are massively threatened by the fast regional warming. Data sets from recent interdisciplinary European-South American field work within ESF-IMCOAST (PolarCLIMATE April 2010-March 2013) and from the Jubany scientific core programme at King George Island (KGI) will be nested and cross-validated with southern stations on WAP: the US Palmer and the British Rothera station. Links with both stations and program leaders (Ducklow, CU, New York, US (formerly at MBL Woods Hole, US); and Meredith, NERC-BAS, Cambridge, UK) have been established in IMCOAST. IMCONet objectives are A) to develop predictive climate change and ecosystem models for the whole WAP coastal environment based on existing data sets and data exchange policies, B) transfer of knowledge between partner countries to enhance collaboration with high quality long-term measuring programs at all 3 stations, to fill present measuring gaps. This will solidify the basis for the prediction of climate change effects in the South. The proposed sortium sists of 16 institutional partners across 10 countries with 85 travelling scientists. Ten partners already collaborate successfully as EU and associated teams in ESF-IMCOAST, and IMCONet will be coordinated by the same PI (Abele, AWI). Whereas ESRs are considered mostly for longer training and collaboration periods, exchange of ERs will also foster joint teaching in the partner countries and collaboration in future science projects. The concept of IMCONet is to strengthen European engagement in Antarctic climate change research, as complementing approach to the major EU focus in the Arctic. It will sustain ongoing European Antarctic research in a future network with competent South American partners.
