Whilst most of Norway calms down when the summer approaches; in our discipline of field ecology the months of June, July and August are the highlight of the action. This summer has seen yet again a great amount of project planning, data collection, identifying sedges without flowers, cooking leaves, and hiking across Bergen municipality.
For project Ecobudgets, Hanif Kawousi has been busy mapping biodiversity in Bergen kommune. Ticking off one after the other of 200 randomly selected locations across the municipality, he and intern Doreen Gassert record plant species composition, soil depth, and other ecosystem properties at each location. In addition, master student Clemens Schmidt has collected soil samples to assess the carbon stocks in the Bergen soils.
Nadine Arzt has collected her final round of vegetation data for project RangeX, where she studies the impact of range-expanding lowland plant species into the alpine realm. Together with intern Kai Hahn, master student Sarah Zimmermann and technician Dagmar Egelkraut, 60 plots of one square meter each were carefully inventoried over the course of 5,5 weeks. Alongside, Silje Skomedal has sown seeds of our lowland plant species and recorded germination rates in situ for her Master thesis project.
In early August, Susanne Berthelsen led a 2-week campaign revisiting the sites of project INCLINE to collect an additional round of plant community analysis in suddenly cold and wet conditions around 1200 masl, together with Ragnhild Gya, Joachim Töpper, Kari Klanderud, Kai Hahn and Dagmar Egelkraut.
In project Durin, an impressive team works across 3 sampling rounds and 4 locations to measure a whole range of properties relating to dwarf shrubs. From carbon flux measurements across the season (Kristine Birkeli) and across 24 hours (Elias Eide Skaslien), to the thermal tolerance of leaves and their photosynthetic capacity (Sonya Geange, Marine Dange), plant and moss community composition (Vendula Spackova and Viljar Storvik), and shrub properties aimed at integration of dwarf shrubs into land surface models (Jeanne Rezsohazy). Together with, and thanks to also an amazing team of intern students Ross Brown, Sam King, Ilko Sijbesma, Verena Waider, Gwendoline Vieilledent, Diana Spath, Teresa Pissermayr, and PhD student Mika Kirkhus, this mammoth effort has been very successful, and will be finished in September when the last round of measurements has been completed!
Of course, fieldwork is not the only thing that we get up to in summer. Special shout out to the following other summer highlights:
- All previously collected biomass from the Vestland Climate grid is now sorted into functional groups thanks to the amazing effort of technicians Susanne Berthelsen and Linn Krüger, and interns Dilsa Dag, Max Erdel, and Florian Engelscharmüller
- Joseph Gaudard published his Fluxible R package on CRAN and submitted the accompanying methods paper
- Vigdis Vandvik took part in multiple sessions about nature, area and sustainability during Arendalsuke
And with that, we are ready for autumn. But first – we finish the last round of work in Durin, and at least some of us will take a little, well-deserved, break. Ha det bra!
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