Quantitative studies on sediment fluxes and sediment budgets in changing cold environments : potential and expected benefit of coordinated data exchange and the unification of methods

most sensitive regions to climate change. The European Science Foundation (ESF) SEDIFLUX Network has been analysing the impact of climate change on landforms in high-latitude and high-altitude cold environments, via the mobilisation, movement and deposition of sediments by slope processes, rivers, glaciers, coastal processes and wind. SEDIFLUX has over the last years evolved into a coordinated multidisciplinary and multinational effort to monitor the changing structure of landforms in cold environments and has led to a series of coordinated research initiatives. The efforts conducted within the SEDIFLUX Network were urgently needed, given the critical importance of studying the impact of projected climate change on the land structure of such sensitive environments. There is especially strong synergy with the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX), whose focus is to determine the relationship between changing climate and circumpolar plant species. The impact of climate on plant species would be mediated partly through changes in land structure brought about by sediment transfers. SEDIFLUX has established a sustainable framework for long-term research to coordinate multinational, interdisciplinary monitoring networks, a first in the field of geomorphology. SEDIFLUX is now providing the basis for further research. One of the major outcomes produced by the SEDIFLUX group will be the SEDIFLUX Manual, which will provide guidelines and protocols for monitoring and sediment budget studies in selected globally distributed cold environment key test catchments. These long-term monitoring campaigns will apply unified approaches and standardized methods to generate comparable datasets from different cold environments for the development of a metadata database and for modelling the impact of climate change on sediment transfers and sediment budgets. The new I.A. G. /A.I.G. Working Group SEDIBUD (Sediment Budgets in Cold Environments) (http://www.geomorph.org/wg/wgsb.html) builds on, continues and extends activities, which have been started within SEDIFLUX. There is a wide range of high-latitude and high-altitude cold environments that need to be studied, from high Arctic / Antarctic to sub-Arctic / sub-Antarctic, alpine and upland sites. This provides a great opportunity to investigate relationships between climate, vegetation cover and sedimentary transfer processes across a diverse range of cold environments, with the ability to model the effects of climate change and related vegetation cover adjustments through space-for-time substitution. Climate change affects Earth surface systems all over the world but with arguable the greatest impact in high-latitude and high-altitude cold environments. In these areas climate change shapes earth surface processes not just by altering vegetation and human activities but also through its impact on frost penetration and duration within the ground surface layers. Climate change also exerts a strong control on cryospheric systems, influencing the nature and ex-