By Imke Smit, PhD Student at the University of Pretoria My experience as a PhD student from South Africa visiting the BTF lab. When I started my PhD in 2025, I was elated to hear that there is funding available for me to go on a research visit to the BTF lab. The day finally READ MORE
Author: Dagmar
Attending EGU26 in Vienna: My First Scientific Conference
Hi! I’m Anna, a master’s student in the BTF group. I will be writing my master’s thesis on interaction of global change drivers on carbon dynamics in Afromontane grasslands, with Aud Halbritter as my main supervisor. In May (3–8 May), I had the opportunity to attend the European Geosciences Union General Assembly (EGU) in READ MORE
Fieldwork in the Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa
Hello! I’m Anna, a master’s student in the BTF research group. I’m currently writing my master’s thesis as part of the NatuRA project, which has established an experiment at 2000, 2500 and 3000 m above sea level in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. In January, during Norway’s shortest and coldest days, me and two of READ MORE
Intern blog: Chasing blueberries above the Arctic Circle
By Vendula Špačková, Applied Ecology student, CZU Prague I am a Bachelor student of Applied Ecology at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. As part of my studies, I wanted to complete an internship abroad and actively searched for opportunities that would combine ecology, fieldwork, and international experience. After applying and successfully passing READ MORE
Fieldwork for the DURIN project – from north to south, east to west
By Mika Kirkhus In September 2025 Jeanne, Sonya, Léo, Vendy, Kristine, Elias, Inge, and Mika of the Between the Fjords research group carried out one of its final field campaigns for the DURIN project. DURIN aims to understand how dwarf shrubs in boreal, alpine, and arctic ecosystems respond to a changing climate. To study this, READ MORE
Vigdis Vandvik to be Coordinating Lead Author on next IPCC report
After her role as coordinating lead author for the IPBES Invasive Alien Species Assessment, Vigdis Vandvik will now contribute to the upcoming seventh IPCC report and be co-responsible for a chapter on how climate change affects biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services on land and in freshwater. The Coordinating Lead Authorship will be shared with Denis J. READ MORE
10 years of data collection: a reproducibility case study
Since 2015, the Plant Functional Traits Courses have collected ecosystem gas fluxes data in China, Peru, Svalbard, western Norway and South Africa. But since 2015, the method to process such data has also evolved a lot, and we have now developed the fluxible R package to make it reproducible and faster. There is now an READ MORE
MSc thesis: The role of belowground fungi in the carbon cycle
Background Belowground fungi are key players in the decomposition of plant litter, and therefore in regulating the carbon cycle. Despite their importance, we still know relatively little about how these fungi respond to climate change, and how such responses, in turn, influence decomposition rates across Norway. Using cutting-edge molecular approaches, such as metabarcoding, we can READ MORE
What do people really know about nature, and the biodiversity crisis?
To solve the biodiversity crisis, we need to stop the spread of alien species, stop sacrificing nature to build stuff, and protect areas and species that need protection. But to do so, people need to understand, know, and value nature and biodiversity. In this project we will try to figure out what people know about READ MORE
In-depth study of microclimate manipulations in a global warming ecology experiment
In this project you get to work with climate data from microclimate loggers, and local climate stations. We use these data to fully disentangle the effect of mini-greenhouses, called Open-Top Chambers (OTCs) that are being used in climate change experiments in alpine and arctic ecosystems worldwide to investigate the effect of climate warming on vegetation. READ MORE