“Get your motor runnin’ Head out on the highway Looking for adventure In whatever comes our way” (Steppenwolf – Born To Be Wild)  Collecting our samples from three countries at 5 locations requires a bit of travelling endurance. Altogether we cover about 1960 km in northern Fennoscandia in our rental car and cross the national […]

Excuse me, as what? VINCERO= Viruses In Northern Cyclic EpiRrita and Operophtera populations The last two years were hard on the mountain birches especially at Abisko (Sweden) and Kilpisjärvi (Finland) due to defoliation by Epirrita autumnata and Operophtera  brumata. Densities of the two geometrids were extremely high in 2013 marking the peak of their 9-10-year cyclic […]

I started wondering today, where has all the time gone between our arrival and today. Well this is how we spent the 3 days: We drove in total about 1000 km, of which 674 km yesterday. We crossed the border between Finland and Norway in total 4 times, of which 3 yesterday, and drove along […]

Summer came and went, and the autumn road trip for the INTERACT project CAPISCO started on the 15th September. This time we decided to start from Finland, from the Kevo Subarctic Research Institute. We flew to Kiruna (Sweden), got into our rented Hyundai and started the 670km drive towards northern Finland.  The drive was long […]

Day 9 continued: We had another couple of hundred kilometers to go from Nuorgam , (which is, by the way, European Union’s most northernmost town), so we left Finland behind and drove along the eastern Norwegian coast south towards Kirkenes and Svanhovd Research Station. The previously defoliated area seemed to extend all the way to […]

Days 6-7: After a short midsummer break we drove 400km north to Kevo research station at Utsjoki in Finland. The rain from Norway caught up with us and the thunder and lightning that came with it hit the transmission tower near the station cutting us (and half of the people in Utsjoki village) off the […]

Day 1: We arrived at Kiruna around 1 pm and headed straight to the car rental desk where we had reserved a car for our trip. I think I already smelled the birches and the sight of the fjälls and mountains made me smile.  This is what I have been waiting for all spring. I […]