I admit grasses scared me for a long time. No, I don’t have hay fever. But identifying grasses correctly is difficult. This year I decided to record the flowering of the grasses. And now I suddenly see grasses everywhere. And I start to like them.
A trip to three different sites thought me that patience is needed this year…
Summer in Norway is late this year. 2 weeks delayed in the lowlands and we don’t know about the mountains, because there is still too much snow to say. At least one of my sites is ready and I get a mini field trip each week. Last week some planst finally decided to start flowering: among the first are Viola palustris (Marsh violet), Anthoxanthum odoratum (sweet vernal grass) and Carex vaginata (Sheated sedge).
The last few month I have been working on a report about our field site in western Norway. The report was meant as „thank you“ for the farmers and landowners who provided the field sites. We report main results and stories from our field work.
The report is in Norwegian, but there are a lot of pictures!
Last week I heard a talk from Judith Sarneel, biologist using tea bags for science. Yes, it sounds funny, but it’s for real. The idea is to burry tea bags into the soil to measure how fast the tea decompose („eaten by soil organisms“). The longterm goal is to get as many people involved as possible to participate to measure the decomposition rate all over the world. They use a very simple standardized method that anybody can do: burry some tea bags for 3 month, take them out, dry them and weight them.
So if your interested check out the webpage: TBI
(pic from the TBI homepage)
Weekly comics about academia!
I am back in the office and have to plan what I am going to do for the next 9 month before I can go out to the field again. I like organizing, but I sometimes get lost in big tasks. I have tried several things to get more organized, like writing lists. But nothing really worked until I came across the Bullet Journal. It looks complicated in the beginning and you have to write with a real pen, but when do you ever write these days? For me it’s an easy way to organize my tasks and it involves checking boxes when a task is done (which I love). In addition, I can continue to use „my bible“ (a simple black Moleskin journal that I have used during my PhD, it’s the second book, so I guess Bible II).
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.
Writing a paper can be a very long process, especially if it is one of your first papers. But finally it is out. This paper is about the field survey I did in summer 2010 in Scandinavia and Switzerland, where I made a lot of nice pictures. The reason is that I surveyed road sites for days and carried my camera everywhere around with me.
Please let me know if you would like to read the paper…
