Federico Bert, who is completing a doctoral dissertation based on this project at the University of Buenos Aires, attended the colloquium "Policy Planning and Decision Making Involving Climate Change and Variability" in Boulder, Colorado, 11-22 September 2006.

The Colloquium was jointly organized by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI).

 Visit the Colloquium's WWW site

Dr. Elke Weber gave an invited presentation at the international conference "Living with Climate Variability", organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and co-hosted by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). The conference was held in Espoo, Finland, 17-21 July 2006.

Dr. Weber's talk was titled "The psychology of decision making" and a copy of her presentation is available below.

Dr. Claudia Natenzon talked about "Interdisciplinary research and participation: Reflections on a project about biocomplexity" at the seminar "Scientific Culture and Society" on July 4, 2006,

The seminar focused on science, technology and society and was organized by the Centro Cultural Parque de España, REDES, the University of Rosario, the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, and the Organization of Ibero-American States.

Licenciadas Silvia Núñez and Maru Skansi from the Argentine Meteorological Service gave a presentation at AACREA Headquarters in Buenos Aires to introduce the Standarized Precipitation Index to two groups of AACREA farmers from northern Buenos Aires and Northern Cordoba (the two locations targeted in this study).

In June 2006, project participants from the Argentine Meteorological Service (SMN) started producing operationally a new climate diagnostic product for the Argentine Pampas: the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Originally developed to monitor onset and duration of droughts in the American West, the SPI is now being calculated for over 30 locations in the Pampas for temporal scales ranging from 1 to 12 months. SPI maps for the lmost recent month can be found at the Met Service's WWW site (http://www.meteofa.mil.ar/?mod=clima&id=55).

The second annual meeting of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) took place at Columbia University, New York City, 11-12 May 2006. CRED is an interdisciplinary center that studies individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk. Various investigators in this project (Podestá, Weber, Broad, Laciana) are involved in CRED activities, and one of the CRED field studies is focused on decision-making in the Argentine Pampas. For more information on CRED, visit CRED's WWW site.

A meeting of the Argentine investigators participating in this project was held on 23 March 2006. Colleagues from the Argentine Meteorological Service hosted the meeting. Because the project is half-way through its duration, a central goal of the meeting was to agree on specific steps needed to complete the project timely and successfully. Major emphasis was placed on the integration and synthesis of results from the various research lines. Ms. Clark Seipt (Penn State graduate student participating in the project) attended the meeting, as she was in Buenos Aires to meet with collaborators on her field work.