Reports from INTERACT field sites
We spent the first day scouting out possible field sites. We prepared as possible in in advance, – via Google Earth, maps and landcover products, talking to people familiar with the area, reading the literature, but it’s never quite the same as being there on the ground. We’d earmarked some possible sites from GoogleEarth, – […]
Read More…The next leg of the journey from Gothenburg to Abisko spans 1040 miles and will take 2 days. Feeling refreshed after the relaxing ferry journey, we left Gothenburg at 9.30 am, and headed north-east towards Stockholm. The landscape was mainly agricultural, with large deep red farmhouses and barns dotted throughout. As we skirted by Stockholm […]
Read More…We decided to drive to our Arctic fieldsite, – partly because we were taking a lot of equipment, and having a car there gives us some flexibility, and partly because I love a road trip, and opportunities to drive the length of Sweden don’t come around everyday. So equipped with a mixtape (or a Spotify […]
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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 […]
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This July, we planted seeds on 1000 meters in the mountains, well above their current growing limits. Now, at the end of August, we were very curious to see if they managed to germinate. It was an exciting hike to the top, our thoughts switching between ‘oh no,everything will be dead!’ and ‘this gonna be […]
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We are back in Abisko after two months. Right before the start of the rainy autumn weather – it might fall upon us on our last day – we are here to harvest the seedlings of our two-year experiment. We take a week to skim the mountains and bring down the harvest to the research […]
Read More…When plants from the cosy environment of western Europe arrive in the high north, you would expect they are not used to the cold environment over there. Some of them however seem to do pretty well in the Swedish mountains, unlike what could be expected based on the climatic conditions in these harsh environments. We want to know the limitations of […]
Read More…Its been over a week since my last blog, but time is of the essence now, with the end of the field season fast approaching. Over the last couple of weeks we have had some heavy days in the lab, sampling and sorting through the root ingrowth cores from the elevated CO2 x UV-B experiment. […]
Read More…Things move at their own pace in these parts, especially the weather. But, summer may have arrived at last, with sunshine and blue sky promised this week! I made the most of the fine conditions yesterday and collected soil and gas flux samples from the heath as part of the spatial survey of microbial diversity. […]
Read More…It has been some time since my last post, as I have been busy in the lab back at Aberystwyth working through and processing the samples collected from May. But now a short break is due as I join fellow researchers Dr Dylan Gwynn-Jones and Dr Alan Jones in the field for our summer visit […]
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Arctic Research 