A comprehensive understanding of the regional vegetation responses to long‐term climate change will help to forecast Earth system dynamics. Based on a new well‐dated pollen data set from Kanas Lake and a review on the published pollen records in and around the Altai Mountains, the regional vegetation dynamics and forcing mechanisms are discussed. In the Altai Mountains, the forest optimum occurred during 10–7 ka for the upper forest zone and the tree line decline and/or ecological shifts were caused by climatic cooling from around 7 ka. In the lower forest zone, the forest reached an optimum in the middle Holocene, and then increased openness of the forest, possibly caused by both climate cooling and human activities, took place in the late Holocene. In the lower basins or plains around the Altai Mountains, the development of protograssland or forest benefited from increasing humidity in the middle to late Holocene.

Unprecedented changes in the climate and environment have been observed in the three poles, including the North Pole, the South Pole, and the Third Pole–Tibetan Plateau. Although considerable data have been collected and several observation networks have been built in these polar regions, the three poles are relatively data-scarce regions due to inaccessible data acquisition, high-cost labor, and difficult living environments. To address the obstacles to better understanding the unprecedented changes in the three poles and their effects on the global environment and humans, there is a pressing need for better data acquisition, curation, integration, service, and application to support fundamental scientific research and sustainable development for the three poles. CASEarth Poles, a project within the framework of the “CAS Big Earth Data Science Engineering” program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, aims to construct a big data platform for the three poles. CASEarth Poles will be devoted to 1) breaking the bottleneck of polar data curation, integration, and sharing; 2) developing high-resolution remote sensing products over the three poles; 3) generating atmospheric reanalysis datasets for the polar regions; 4) exploring the synchronization, asynchronization, and teleconnection of the environmental changes in the three poles; 5) investigating the climate, water cycle, and ecosystem dynamics and the interactions among the multispheres in the polar regions and their global effects; and 6) supporting decision-making with regard to sea ice forecasting, infrastructure, and sustainable development in polar regions. CASEarth Poles will collaborate with international efforts to enable better data and information services for the three poles in the big data era.

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the world’s “Third Pole” due to its high altitude, is experiencing rapid, intense climate change, similar to and even far more than that occurring in the Arctic and Antarctic. Scientific data sharing is very important to address the challenges of better understanding the unprecedented changes in the Third Pole and their impacts on the global environment and humans. The National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (TPDC, http://data.tpdc.ac.cn) is one of the first 20 national data centers endorsed by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China in 2019 and features the most complete scientific data for the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions, hosting more than 3,500 datasets in diverse disciplines. Fifty datasets featuring high-mountain observations, land surface parameters, near-surface atmospheric forcing, cryospheric variables, and high-profile article-associated data over the Tibetan Plateau, frequently being used to quantify the hydrological cycle and water security, early warning assessments of glacier avalanche disasters, and other geoscience studies on the Tibetan Plateau, are highlighted in this manuscript. The TPDC provides a cloud-based platform with integrated online data acquisition, quality control, analysis, and visualization capability to maximize the efficiency of data sharing. The TPDC shifts from the traditional centralized architecture to a decentralized deployment to effectively connect Third Pole–related data from other domestic and international data sources. As an embryo of data sharing and management over extreme environment in the upcoming “big data” era, the TPDC is dedicated to filling the gaps in data collection, discovery, and consumption in the Third Pole, facilitating scientific activities, particularly those featuring extensive interdisciplinary data use.