News

News Archive

• Aberdeen Ecologists in the High Arctic
• April 2004, two affiliates of the Northern Studies Centre simultaneously receive prestigious prizes from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
• NSC mountain ecologists help conservation in Wales
• Funding success for major NSC Seminar Series
• New arctic researcher joins the NSC
• Swedish ecology comes to Aberdeen!
• NSC Conference Day
• Seminar Series News
• Three-Year Review: A brief summary of the achievements of the Northern Studies Centre in our first three years of existence, and of our future aims, was presented to the Board of the Aberdeen Research Consortium in January, 2004.

            Aberdeen Ecologists in the High Arctic

Summer 2005 saw a large team of ecologists from the University of Aberdeen, CEH Banchory and MLURI studying the effects of goose grazing and climate change on the carbon and nutrient dynamics of high arctic tundra. Rene van der Wal, Sarah Woodin, Martin Sommerkorn, Sofie Sjogersten, Jemma Gornall, Lisa Cole and three student field assistants were participating in the EU funded "FRAGILE" field experiment, along with colleagues from four other institutions in Norway and the Netherlands. The field experimet is described in words and pictures at http://loonen.fmns.rug.nl/fragile/ .

            Two NSC affiliates receive prizes from Swedish Academic Society

In April 2004, two affiliates of the Northern Studies Centre simultaneously received prestigious prizes from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.

At a special symposium held in Stockholm to mark Vega Day, April 24 th , Tim Ingold (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen) received the Society's Retzius Medal in Gold, in recognition of his contributions to the development of anthropological theory and to the study of human-environment relations especially in the northern circumpolar regions . In the Swedish calendar, Vega Day commemorates the return, in 1880, of the explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld, following his successful navigation of the North East Passage around Siberia. Nordenskiöld received the first Vega Medal in the following year, and was followed by many other famous medallists including Fridtjof Nansen, Ernest Shackleton and Thor Heyerdahl. Nowadays the Society awards the Vega Medal to a physical geographer every third year. In the intervening two years it awards the Retzius Medal (named after the anatomist and physiologist Anders Retzius, 1796-1860) to a human geographer and an anthropologist.

The Society also awards an annual prize of 20,000 Swedish crowns for the best doctoral dissertation in geography or anthropology in Sweden to have been defended over the previous year. The 2004 award, presented at a dinner after the Vega Symposium, went to Sofie Sjögersten, for her thesis on ‘Soil organic matter dynamics and methane fluxes at the forest-tundra ecotone in Fennoscandia'. Sofie's doctoral research was carried out at the Earth Sciences Department at Uppsala University. She is now undertaking postdoctoral research in Plant and Soil Sciences, at the University of Aberdeen, under the direction of Dr Sarah Woodin. She is investigating the tundra ecosystem on Svalbard, looking at how carbon and nitrogen cycling responds to pressures of increased goose grazing and climatic warming.

NSC mountain ecologists help conservation in Wales

The Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) is benefiting from the expertise of Andrea Britton (MLURI) and Imogen Pearce (CEH) in a project on the condition and conservation of montane heath and summit heath vegetation in Wales. The project will aid conservation of montane heath in North Wales by investigating whether overgrazing or atmospheric nitrogen deposition are the main causes for this community's decline, particularly on the Carneddau massif in Snowdonia, Wales (highest point 1064m). The study will provide information on the status of the Welsh montane heaths, indicate the current influence overgrazing and nitrogen pollution are having in their decline, and advise whether a reduction in grazing levels might result in the restoration of these communities. Imogen and Andrea are both already investigating similar issues in Scottish montane heaths.

Funding success for major NSC Seminar Series

Thanks to an application put together on behalf of NSC by Tim Ingold and Rene van der Wal, we have been awarded over £19 k by ESRC/NERC to fund a transdisciplinary seminar series on 'Sustainability, biodiversity and knowledge in northern circumpolar regions'.

The seminar series will consist of 6 major events over the next two academic years. It will be a fantastic opportunity for us to invite both speakers and participants to Aberdeen, to stimulate our interdisciplinary research discussions.

Seminar Information

New arctic researcher joins the NSC

Dr Martin Sommerkorn has joined the staff of the Macaulay Institute to work in the Soil Plant Microbial Interactions Programme. Martin was previously based at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he was working at the Toolik Lake site in Alaska on carbon and nutrient dynamics of tundra vegetation.

Swedish ecology comes to Aberdeen!

NSC welcomes Sofie Sjögersten and Petra Fransson, both from Uppsala, to Aberdeen. Sofie, from Uppsala University Department of Physical Geography, is working with with Sarah Woodin (Plant & Soil Science) and Rene van der Wal (CEH) on the EU funded "FRAGILE" project. She will be studying carbon and nitrogen dynamics on the Svalbard tundra, in a large collaborative experiment investigating the effects of goose grazing and climate change on ecosystem structure and function. (info. from sstu@ceh.ac.uk). Petra, from SLU Uppsala, Dept of Forest Mycology and Pathology, holds a personal fellowship to work with Prof Ian Alexander on the ecophysiology of ectomycorrhizal fungi (info from. p.fransson@abdn.ac.uk).

NSC Conference Day

A very successful NSC conference day was held at CEH on November 6th 2002. A diverse and fascinating programme of short talks ranged from valuing wilderness in Iceland, to the Dogrib Denes' perspetive of landscape and place, to caribou migration, to montane heath ecology, to the chemistry of Scots pine…. via all sorts of equally interesting topics on the way! We were also honoured to have an excellent guest lecture from Prof Bob Jefferies (Toronto) on his work on goose grazing and trophic cascades in Arctic Canada. The 40 or so NSC folk present seemed to find the day very stimulating and it is hoped to repeat the event next autumn.