The first NordBorN meeting was held in Iceland on March 5-8, 2024. This first meeting was hosted by the Agricultural University of Iceland, and was held at the beautiful campus of AUI in Hvanneyri. Twenty-one project members participated in the meeting and a few others joined online. All the nine NordBorN partners were represented at the meeting.
During the meeting we used some time to introduce the work that we are doing as individual researchers, to find connections and potential synergies. We brainstormed on future collaborations within and beyond the network, and had a lot of discussions of what borealization really means. We solved some practical issues and we hosted an open meeting to invite other researchers to join NordBorN activities. We are looking forward to the next five years of collaboration!
Tundra ecosystems are changing fast in response to ongoing climate change and increased human pressures linked to land use changes. One derived phenomenon from these impacts is the northward shift in the distribution of species from southern latitudes, a process known as borealization. While borealization trends have long been recognized in marine Arctic ecosystems, few local studies have investigated parallel trends in terrestrial plant communities, and to date there are no assessments of biome-scale plant borealization. Using existing plot-level vegetation data from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX+) network, this project will quantify plant borealization at a pan-Arctic scale and identify the main drivers contributing to this phenomenon. Specifically, we will measure to which extent borealization has already occurred, assess where borealization of plant communities is more likely to occur, and identify which plant species are more likely to drive borealization patterns.
This project is partly funded by a NERC UK-Iceland Arctic Science Partnership Scheme awarded to Mariana Garcia Criado and Isabel C Barrio. This project is a contribution to the CHARTER project funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (grant agreement nr. 869471).
The project lead is Mariana Garcia Criado, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
We are seeking a highly qualified, ambitious, and motivated PhD candidate for a fully-funded 4 year project focusing on genomics of Arctic alien plants. The project will focus on target alien plant species and seek to uncover their genomic basis of adaptation to the Arctic environment and how it relates to their invasiveness.
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 and naturalised 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. The PhD project will develop genomic datasets, making use of field collections and herbarium resources, and 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.
Wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris) is an established and naturalised alien species in the Arctic
The work will consist of arctic field work, herbarium work, green house experimental work, DNA lab and bioinformatics in an international interdisciplinary team. More specifically, the successful candidate will:
Manage and supervise third-party services to achieve high-quality reference genomes suitable for population genomic analyses
Assemble a spatial and temporal sampling of herbarium and fresh specimens
Produce NGS libraries and sequencing data using clean-lab facilities and third-party services
Analyse sequencing data combined with available genomic resources and complementary experimental evidence to unravel the evolutionary history of parallel Arctic invasions, including the phylogeography of established populations, the genetic architecture of adaptation to the Arctic environment, and the role of different chemotypes in the context of the enemy release hypothesis
Analyse temporal data to assess turnover of allele frequencies following introduction and bottlenecks
Design and perform common garden experiments to test the adaptive role of shifts in enemy pressure, breeding system and life-history traits underlying invasiveness under current and future climate
Disseminate results in scientific literature, to relevant stakeholders and the public
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 (https://geobiology.ethz.ch/research/arctic-greening.html) based at ETH Zürich. The work will also be part of the Nordic Borealization Network (NordBorN) that seeks to understand the processes, drivers, and consequences of changes in the species composition of tundra ecosystems.
