The last day of sampling in Kobberfiord!!
Still good weather on 30, July 2017 with no wind at all and still thousands of mosquitoes!
Claudia&Claudia are very lucky with the weather during our sampling, the weather prediction for the next week will be mainly rain and fog and they know last week was bad weather for sampling.
They decided to sample also around the lake Badesø, near the Climate Monitoring Area, to take advantage of the climate data available on the INTERACT website with the microbial biodiversity. This area was very wet, characterized mostly by FEN vegetation, but they sampled where sampling is possible.
Walking back to the cabin, the landscape was amazing, the lake water was so clear that you can even count every stone in the deep, and the sun was reflecting on lake surface, with a breeze air on our face…oh what a beautiful day!!
On their back way…

OPS! Wrong sampling!
Oh, as good mycologists, they got in confusion and sampled many mushrooms!!! They are good to eat, so let’s do Italian PASTA with mushrooms!!
Anyway, we have done for now in Kobbefjord field station and they will come back home with almost 70 soil samples and looking forward to analyze them and understand these peculiar ecosystems. We are going to analyze the microbial communities using Amplicon Sequencing (Next Generation Sequencing) approach to see which bacterial and fungal species are predominant in that area, to investigate the biodiversity and how it changes according with altitude and vegetation gradients.according with altitude and vegetation gradients.

Total samples. We got a lot of work!
Goodbye Kobbefjord! We are going to miss your sunset!!

Midnight in Kobbefjord
Back to the “real life”, we are so happy for our first Arctic expedition and we are very enthusiastic about this adventure. The Kobbefjord area is perfect for our purpose and the cabin is very comfortable and equipped and became immediately “our home”.
In the end, we would really thank the INTERACT community for accepting our COMICS-G project, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources for hosting them, Katrine Raundrup for her assistance and help before and during their stay, the other team members Laura Zucconi (PI project) and Laura Selbmann and…
last but not least all of you for reading our experience.