Photography – Arctic Research

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? […]

by lembrechtsjonas

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 […]

by lembrechtsjonas

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 […]

by lembrechtsjonas

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 […]

by lembrechtsjonas

Aliens and their way to the top

5 years later, we are getting ready for a re-survey of our longterm observational plots along the roads in the Norwegian mountains. The perfect moment to summarize in a series of posts what we learned from our first trip. Remember my story about how lowland roadsides are flooded with species that do not belong in the natural […]

by lembrechtsjonas

Road effects

5 years later, we are getting ready for a re-survey of our longterm observational plots along the roads in the Norwegian mountains. The perfect moment to summarize for a second what we learned from our first trip. Roadsides host more plant species than the natural vegetation. That is the conclusion I drew in my previous post. […]

by lembrechtsjonas

Flying a helicopter

This post was originally posted on ‘On top of the world‘. Our most remote plots involve hours of climbing on steep mountain slopes, through dense willow shrubs and over dry rocky areas. But not this time. This time we had to walk for 20 minutes to Abisko’s helicopter base and do the full hourlong walk in less […]

by lembrechtsjonas

A happy reunion

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 […]

by lembrechtsjonas

Back to the top

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 […]

by lembrechtsjonas

Pretty flowers and angry lemmings

This is a post in a serie about the Arctic part of our global study of plant invasions. Click on these links for more information about me or my research! The first day of our field trip to Abisko was already a big win. We had both weather ànd nature on our site, which resulted in some unforgettable […]