I got a letter from Switzerland this week. One question was, what are you doing up there? I thought it’s time to explain you why I am here and what the heck I am doing.

I am doing a Postdoc at the University of Bergen. I am interested in the effects of climate change on alpine plant communities. For five years Professor Vigdis Vandvik has conducted a large transplant experiment, where they transplanted vegetation turfs along a temperature and precipitation gradient to simulate future change in climate (warmer and wetter conditions).  They have studied changes in vegetation composition, seedling recruitment and species interactions.

I am interested in how plant phenology is responding to changing climate conditions. For this, I go to the field every week to check when the plants start to produce buds, flowers and seeds and I want to compare if there are differences between the local plants and those which have been transplanted from colder and drier sites. I hypothesize that plants from colder are used to shorter growing seasons and will therefore flower earlier compared to plants from warmer sites. More information here.