Introduction:
By hosting our workshop, the CESEFOr Foundation (www.cesefor.com) made a con- siderable contribution to a successful start of Phase 2 of PAGES’ EuroMed2k working group. Soria was selected as the location not the least because it is a region on the Iberian Peninsula where a marked drying trend has affected ecosystem functioning and productivity since the 1970s (Büntgen et al. 2012, 2013). As a consequence, some local agriculture foci already shifted from tradi- tional timber harvesting to non-woody forest products, e.g. mushrooms, and irrigation during summer had to be intensified. The underlying processes forcing this climatic trend are, however, not well understood. Gaining further knowledge on such regional climatic patterns is one of the goals of the EuroMed2k working group. Therefore, and considering a broader spatiotemporal perspective, this working group aims to compile a wide range of proxy data for providing a long-term perspective on the modern climate, performing model-data comparison assessments, and supplementing detection and attribution studies.