All cancer registries should be able to give some objective indication of the quality of the data that they have collected. The methods available were described in an early IARC Technical Report (Parkin et al., 1994) and updated in a pair of papers in 2009 (Parkin and Bray, 2009; Bray and Parkin, 2009). They describe four dimensions of quality: comparability, validity, timeliness, and completen...

The admission of China as an observer in the Arctic Council in 2013 was a significant step in the ongoing evolution of the country’s Arctic policy, but Beijing is still concerned about being accepted as a regional player given its geography and arguably lack of an Arctic history. As the Arctic becomes more open to scientific and economic engagement, China wishes to develop the idea of the Arcti...

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) is one of the six working groups established under the Arctic Council. AMAP is tasked with monitoring the levels of contaminants present in the Arctic environment and people as well as assessing their effects on a continuous basis, and reporting these results regularly. Most of the presented data have been collected over the last 20 years an...

The Arctic Council in a formal treaty based organization among the eight Arctic Countries (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the United States of America.) with permanent participation by the six indigenous peoples organizations of the Arctic (Aleut International Association, Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwich'in Council International, Inuit Circumpolar...

Satellite observations reveal a substantial decline in September Arctic sea ice extent since 1979, which has played a leading role in the observed recent Arctic surface warming and has often been attributed, in large part, to the increase in greenhouse gases. However, the most rapid decline occurred during the recent global warming hiatus period. Previous studies are often focused on a single m...

The origin of the arctic flora covering the northernmost treeless areas is still poorly understood. Arctic plants may have evolved in situ or immigrated from the adjacent ecosystems. Frequently arctic species have disjunctive distributions between the Arctic and high mountain systems of the temperate zone. This pattern may result from long distance dispersal or from glacial plant migrations and...

Rabies seems to persist throughout most arctic regions, and the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, is the only part of the Arctic where rabies has not been diagnosed in recent time. The arctic fox is the main host, and the same arctic virus variant seems to infect the arctic fox throughout the range of this species. The epidemiology of rabies seems to have certain common characterist...

Human-mediated vectors often inadvertently translocate species assemblages to new environments. Examining the dynamics of entrained species assemblages during transport can provide insights into the introduction risk associated with these vectors. Ship biofouling is a major transport vector of nonindigenous species in coastal ecosystems globally, yet its magnitude in the Arctic is poorly unders...

a call-to-reSearch a rePort from the u.S. arctic reSearch commiSSion coVer PhotoS toP left to bottom right | belugas in the bering Sea seen during the april 2006 u.S. fish and Wildlife Service (uSfWS) Walrus Survey (photo by uSfWS/brad benter). | Polar Sea and Louis S. St. Laurent at end of arctic ocean crossing, north of Svalbard (photo by Knut Aagaard). | Sampling across ice field on the Arct...

Arctic climate changes include not only changes in trends and mean states but also strong interannual variations in various fields. Although it is known that tropical-extratropical teleconnection is sensitive to changes in flavours of El Niño, whether Arctic climate variability is linked to El Niño, in particular on interannual timescale, remains unclear. Here we demonstrate for the first time ...