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The Perth conferences, held every 5 years in Perth, Scotland, bring together people who identify as mountain researchers and who are interested in issues related to global change in mountain social-ecological systems. These conferences provide an opportunity to evaluate the evolution of research directions within the mountain research community, as well as to identify research priorities. The Future Earth Strategic Research Agenda provides a useful framework for evaluating the mountain research community's progress toward addressing global change and sustainability challenges. Using a process originally set up to analyze contributions to the 2010 conference, the abstracts accepted for the 2015 conference in the context of the Future Earth framework were analyzed. This revealed a continued geographic underrepresentation in mountain research of Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia but a more even treatment of biophysical and social science themes than in 2010. It also showed that the Perth conference research community strongly focused on understanding system processes (the Dynamic Planet theme of the Future Earth research agenda). Despite the continued bias of conference contributions toward traditional observation- and conservation-oriented research, survey results indicate that conference participants clearly believe that transdisciplinary, transformative research is relevant to mountains. Of the 8 Future Earth focal challenges, those related to safeguarding natural assets, promoting sustainable land use, increasing resilience and understanding the water-energy-food nexus received considerable attention. The challenges related to sustainable consumption, decarbonizing socioeconomic systems, cities, and health were considerably less well represented, despite their relevance to mountain socioeconomic systems. Based on these findings, we outline a proposal for the future directions of mountain research.

Editorial

The diversity of membership in the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) is one of its principal assets. This diversity is now exemplified in MRI's Science Leadership Council, composed of active mountain researchers from around the world and charged with leading the MRI. The first major task of the Science Leadership Council was the development of MRI's Strategic Plan, a document that makes explicit what has been implicit for years in MRI's activities. The Strategic Plan provides a common vision, a focused mission, a set of guiding principles, long-term goals, and more specific and measurable objectives. It provides the framework for MRI's most recent grant application to the Swiss National Science Foundation and similarly guides the progress of the MRI toward its vision.

Big data. For some, it is a vaguely apocalyptic term; for others, it represents a new era of understanding our environment and ourselves. Today, big data are being harnessed in ever more innovative ways that simply were not possible when we only had small sets of data to work with. Although mountain system research does not yet produce the vast quantities of data that are now common to other fields, there are nevertheless many data that, if pooled, could provide new insights into how mountain socioecological systems function. As the Mountain Research Initiative's Concerted Efforts progress, it becomes clear that it is time for the mountain research community to harness the lessons and power of at least “medium data” to develop a stronger, evidence-based understanding of both the generalities and the specificities of mountain systems.