The second NordBorN meeting will be hosted by our colleagues from Aarhus University on March 25-27, 2025!
Niels and Efrén are working on securing the venue they wanted for those dates, and will come back with some more details soon, including a recommendation for a nice hotel nearby, along with a small excursion to a rewilding center not far from Aarhus. Stay tuned!
It is a pleasure to welcome two new NordBorN members to the team: Anna Moretti and Elias Koivisto.
Anna Moretti started as a NordBorN-PhD student at the NTNU University Museum in the beginning of September. Anna is a botanist with a MSc from the University of Vienna. Her PhD project will focus on the wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris), an established and naturalized alien species in the Arctic. She will use genomics to study its taxonomy and phylogeography, and test hypotheses for its success in the Arctic, including multiple introductions from different genetic sources, enemy release advantage related to plant defense compounds, and shifts in adaptive traits. Her research will add an important evolutionary component to ongoing interdisciplinary research on Arctic greening and invasion biology.
Elias started his PhD journey at UEF in Joensuu in the beginning of August. He holds a BSc in Biology-Earth sciences and a MSc in Geomatics from Stockholm University. His main research focus is studying the greening and shrubification of the Arctic region utilizing multispectral, UAV-RGB and LiDAR remote sensing data as well as field data with machine learning. A part of his research is also connecting these changes to reindeer herding patterns in Northern Fennoscandia and Yamal peninsula.
Arctic tundra ecosystems are changing fast. The cumulative pressures of accelerated warming, land use and demographic and economic tensions impose a circumpolar research effort as well as the integration of a wide range of methodological approaches. Supported by an Arctic Research Studies mobility grant, we aim at establishing a formal collaboration between the University of Oslo, NTNU University Museum and the Agricultural University of Iceland, through the submission of two common research proposals and a postdoctoral fellowship application to investigate plant-herbivore interactions at a pan-Arctic scale. Our collaboration brings highly complementary skillsets as well as a strong international collaboration effort through the Herbivory Network, the Nordic Borealization Network (NordBorN) and the PIECEMEAL network to reinforce Norwegian-Icelandic cooperation in the field of Arctic research.
This project is funded by the Arctic Research and Studies programme awarded to Stefaniya Kamenova, Isabel C Barrio, Mathilde Defourneaux and James Speed.
As part of the project, in early June 2024 project participants met in Oslo and held an open half-day seminar on Arctic herbivory at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the Department of Biosciences of the University of Oslo.
The project lead is Stefaniya Kamenova, researcher at the University of Oslo.
