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Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the community studying the effect of ultraviolet radiation environment, predominantly set by OB stars, on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. This is important because a significant fraction of planetary systems, potentially including our own, formed in close proximity to OB stars. This is a rapidly developing field, with a broad range of observations across many regions recently obtained or recently scheduled. In this paper, stimulated by a series of workshops on the topic, we take stock of the current and upcoming observations. We discuss how the community can build on this recent success with future observations to make progress in answering the big questions of the field, with the broad goal of disentangling how external photoevaporation contributes to shaping the observed (exo)planet population. Both existing and future instruments offer numerous opportunities to make progress towards this goal. 

Abstract The introduction of the Rossby number (R₀), which incorporates the convective turnover time (τ), in 1984 was a pioneering idea for understanding the correlation between stellar rotation and activity. The convective turnover time, which cannot be measured directly, is often inferred using existingτ–mass orτ–color relations, typically established based on an ensemble of different types of stars by assuming thatτis a function of mass. In this work, we use Gaia Early Data Release 3 to demonstrate that the masses used to establish one of the most citedτ-mass relations are overestimated for G-type dwarfs and significantly underestimated for late M dwarfs, offsets that affect studies using thisτ–mass relation to draw conclusions. We discuss the challenges of creating such relations then and now. In the era of Gaia and other large data sets, stars used to establish these relations require characterization in a multidimensional space, rather than via the single-characteristic relations of the past. We propose that new multidimensional relations should be established based on updated theoretical models and all available stellar parameters for different interior structures from a set of carefully vetted single stars, so that the convective turnover time can be estimated more accurately.