Our journey back started early with a 6:20 am departure to Khanty-Manisysk airport, we flew to Moscow and then London for our trains back to the North of Scotland. We wish to express a big thank you to Yugra State University and everyone from group of Environmental Dynamics and Climate Change for hosting us and […]

Our final day in Siberia was a cultural tour day. We went on a tour organised by Yugra State University International Office for their summer school students to see around the University and some of the city sights. In the morning we met the rector of the University and then joined in with a tour […]

On Saturday we completed our fieldwork at Mukhrino by taking in our first round of BVOC samplers and measuring the soil water pH and conductivity. In the evening Roxane prepared the final sauna for after dinner. When I went for the sauna there was some torrential rain – it made for a great cooling shower! […]

Today we are visiting Mukhrino field station for the final time in our trip. We left Shapsha and headed to Khanty-Mansiysk for the boat trip out. Instead of going to the previous pick up point across the Irtysh River, well out of the city, we went with Yaroslav to the city marina where the University […]

Today we are having a repeat of our first day back after Mukhrino. Sorting out the peat samples and drying the vegetation in preparation for C and N analysis.It’s also a chance to update the blog as we have good internet here! It’s very sunny at the moment; hopefully it will be as warm as […]

Today we had an early start to the day and were off for fieldwork at 8am! Roxane, Mark and I were all working together so we got through a lot of work quickly. Roxane did vegetation surveys, while Mark and I collected and filtered water samples and made the other measures like pH, temperatures. At […]

Now that we were loaded with our special permits, we got through the checks into Nymto Park and drove to our base for the night, which was about 3 hours away. This was at first a journey through a mixture of bogs and some very sandy soils which made me think of a desert. After […]

Today we began our journey to the second field station we are visiting – Nymto Park. Nymto is 63 °N, while at Mukhrino and Shapsha we are 61 °N. We started our journey at mid-day and headed east towards the city of Surgut, on the way there we stopped at a Russian roadside diner – […]

Today we are in Shapsha again, a good chance for me to catch up on computer work. Outside the field station there is a white tailed eagle with one wing, which was rescued and has been living here for the past years. He is quite a happy looking fellow and likes looking back when we […]

In the morning there was some lab work to do: drying of some of the vegetation samples we had collected and some subsampling of peat cores taken from our measurement sites at Mukhrino. After lunch we had a walk around Shapsha village which seemed very small and quiet. We later heard lots of loud music […]