Catching the Arctic summer

This post first appeared on lembrechtsjonas.wordpress.com. When summer treats you kindly in the Arctic, there is no better place to be. Summers are short up in the north, however, so you'll need to be lucky to catch them. We were very lucky this year, and were offered countless beautiful summer days up in the north. …

SoilTemp: towards a global map and database of soil temperature and climate

Short: we are looking for soil temperature data from the Arctic and all over the world for inclusion in our global database. This post was published first on lembrechtsjonas.wordpress.com.  Many questions in ecology revolve around climate: what climatic requirements do organisms have, how do they survive in extreme climatic conditions, and - increasingly relevant - …

Trail adventures

Interested to join our MIREN Trail Survey? Find all the details here. The story below gives you a feel of how it works, and originally occurred on lembrechtsjonas.wordpress.com. The story itself plays in the Alps, but gathering more data like this from the Arctic would be of great interest to us, which is why we post …

You’ll never hike alone

This post first appeared on lembrechtsjonas.wordpress.com. It can be quiet lonely out in the mountains: the open vastness of the alpine tundra, the kilometers of rolling mountains in the distance without a soul in sight, or the silence that resonates through the rustling of leaves and the splattering of streams tumbling down a water slide. …

FEASTing in Abisko

It promised to be a windy day with some scattered rain clouds, when we head out to mount Nuolja to join the FEAST-project. FEAST stands for Functional Ecology of Alpine SysTems, a large-scale project to assess soil conditions in mountains worldwide. Such a noble joined effort I find hard to resist, so we signed up …

Worth it

Just imagine: your commute to your office includes a one hour drive, followed by a six kilometer hike with a 600 meter elevation increase. Two hours of consecutive hiking, if you follow a decent pace. And then your office day still has to start. And after 8 hours you still have to head back. Heavy? …

The roadside effect: visual proof

Mountain roadsides, the most fascinating places on earth. That is, if you believe a PhD-student who has been studying them for more than 5 years now. We returned safely from our fieldwork season in the northern Scandes, with suitcases full of data proving the fascinating role of mountain roads in plant species distributions. Whether they …

That damn snow again

During last year's field trip to Sweden, at the very end of August, an early autumn snowstorm threw us of the mountain. You can (re)read the account of that humbling hike here. We were beaten. Defeated. Nature's powers were too strong. We managed to hike up, yes, but trying to identify plants under a growing pile …

On a hunt for mountain plants

We are at the height of our 2017 resurvey of the vegetation along Norwegian mountain roads, and the fieldwork has been highly successfull. It has been great revisiting the plots and discovering the changes - and often the highly interesting lack of it - in the last 5 years. The fieldwork brought some annoying bits …

Live from the field

We are currently on a ten day fieldtrip to the beautiful Lapland, where we are monitoring the movement of plants along mountain roads. A job with a view, plenty of beautiful alpine and arctic plants, and a ton of great and interesting data coming in. More pictures and stories will follow, but now the field …