The 2025 meeting of the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) was held last 29 September to 3 October 2025 in Nordens Ark, a wildlife park dedicated to the conservation of endangered species in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Several NordBorN researchers participated in the meeting, including Mariana Garcia Criado, who presented her recently published paper on plant borealization across the Arctic. Alejandro Salazar presented his work on biocrust-plant interactions at an ITEX site in Iceland.
Last week, Beatrice Trascau and James Speed visited Mariana García Criado at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in sunny Barcelona, Spain.
Mariana reports back from an intensive week of work:
We spent the week working on a NordBorN project with the aim of characterizing boreal and tundra plant species’ functional trait spaces. The workshop was a success and we are currently finalising the analyses and starting to write the manuscript. The idea for this project came up during the first NordBorN meeting in Iceland in 2024, so we are very excited to share some updates with you soon!
During their visit, Beatrice also presented her PhD work to the Global Ecology Unit at CREAF.
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.
Contributions by NordBorN researchers and links to the abstracts:
