Author: Isabel Barrio

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Busy week at EGU 2025

This last week (April 27- May 2) several NordBorN researchers attended the European Geophysical Union (EGU) General Assembly 2025 in Vienna. Mariana and Elias co-convened the session Global change impacts biodiversity, from observations, and experiments to modeling (ITS3.12/BG0.8 + BG3.20) that featured several talks and posters on borealization, and respectively presented posters about NordBorN and Arctic greening trends. Alejo presented his research on biocrust in the Icelandic highlands, and Isabel discussed the use of the term borealization.

Isabel presented the need to unify borealization terminology.

Contributions by NordBorN researchers and links to the abstracts:

  • Salazar, A., Gunnlaugsdóttir, E., Jónsdóttir, I., Klupar, I., Wandji, R.-P., Arnalds, Ó., and Andrésson, Ó.: Increased biocrust cover and activity in the highlands of Iceland after five growing seasons of experimental warming, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-2609, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-2609, 2025
  • Koivisto, E., Kuzmin, A., Berner, L., Forbes, B. C., Kerby, J., Kolari, T., Korpelainen, P., Skarin, A., Tahvanainen, T., Verdonen, M., Villoslada, M., and Kumpula, T.: Understanding Arctic Greening Trends: A Multispectral Approach to Shrubification and Ecological Shifts, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-9963, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-9963, 2025
  • Verdonen, M., Barrio, I. C. and the NordBorN team: NordBorN: a research and educational platform to understand borealization in the Nordic region, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-12001, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12001, 2025
  • Barrio, I. C. and the NordBorN team: Borealization of terrestrial ecosystems: patterns, drivers and consequences , EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-12056, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12056, 2025

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PhD position on the genomics of Arctic invasion at NTNU University Museum, Trondheim

Deadline: May 9, 2025

The NTNU University Museum is seeking a highly qualified, ambitious, and motivated PhD candidate for a project focusing on genomics of Arctic alien plants. A warming climate, changes in soil properties, and rising human activity in the Arctic increase the probability of introduction and establishment of alien plant species. In high-Arctic Svalbard and other Arctic regions, the wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris) is an established alien species. Hypotheses for its success include multiple introductions from different genetic sources, enemy release advantage related to plant defense compounds, and shifts in adaptive traits.

Wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris) is an established alien species in Arctic regions (source: Atlas des plantes de France 1891)

The PhD project will develop genomic datasets, making use of field collections and herbarium resources, and have the possibility to develop experimental evidence to examine links between the genomic basis of successful establishment and potential invasiveness in the high-Arctic. The wintercress will be a primary focus of the project, but complementary research on parallel systems may be developed. The project will add an important evolutionary component to ongoing interdisciplinary research on Arctic greening.

The successful candidate will be employed at the NTNU University Museum’s Department of Natural History. The NTNU University Museum is the natural and cultural history museum of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The Department of Natural History conducts research in systematics and taxonomy, evolutionary genomics, as well as in phylogeography, population genetics, and ecology with an emphasis on conservation biology. Your immediate leader will be the Head of Department.

The team of supervisors will consist of Ass. Prof. Kristine Bakke Westergaard (main supervisor), as well as co-supervisors Prof. Mike Martin and Dr. Simone Fior (ETH Zürich, Switzerland). The candidate will use the NTNU University Museum’s herbarium, genomics laboratory facilities and computational resources, and the work will be closely associated with a project on Arctic greening based at ETH Zürich. The work will also be part of the Nordic Borealization Network  that seeks to understand the processes, drivers, and consequences of changes in the species composition of tundra ecosystems.

More details can be found here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/278168/phd-candidate-in-arctic-alien-plant-genomics

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Machine learning and herbarium specimens to assess changes in flowering phenology

A recent paper from the Machine Vision for Natural History research group at NTNU University Museum, including several NordBorN members, reports on global trends in flowering phenology, an indicator of the impact of anthropogenic climate change. A machine learning model was used to examine more than 8 million images of herbarium specimens from around the world and spanning two centuries. High diversity in temporal trends in flowering seasonality was found across different ecoregions, with greater variability at low latitudes than at high latitudes. This likely reflects the effects of a combination of shifts in temperature and precipitation seasonality, together with lower photoperiodic constraints to flowering. The study demonstrates the utility of machine learning approaches in large-scale analysis of museum collections and underscores both the importance of natural history collections in assessing long-term trends and the need for digitization efforts to make such specimens available to researchers across the world.

Future work is planned to link global flowering phenology patterns with local climate data, and to examine borealization by combining analysis of historical museum collections with data from field studies. You can read the paper here.

Reference: Williamson, D.R., Prestø, T., Westergaard, K.B., Trascau, B.M., Vange, V., Hassel, K., Koch, W. and Speed, J.D., Long‐term trends in global flowering phenology. New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70139

Image: Herbarium specimen of Leucanthemum maximum from the NTNU collection which was IDed by one of the co-authors