Project Coordinator for the Climate Impacts Research Centre (CIRC).
I am an evolutionary ecologist with almost 30 years experience conducting research and fieldwork traveling the world. Today I am the Project Coordinator for the Climate Impacts Research Centre (CIRC) at Umeå University. Here I maintain the research infrastructure and teaching environment at the Abisko Scientific Research Station. These activities include coordinating teaching and conducting research. Importantly, I engage the public directly through extensive outreach activities and citizen science at the research station, in the Abisko National Park, and internationally. A thread to all of my research is to put it into a regional or global context for the public and whenever possible to engage the public directly in the science.
My research focuses on how life history adaptations in Arctic and alpine species are shaped by the environment. Further, how the timing of life history events are affected by climate and environmental change. For example, how do species at the borders of their ranges deal with this change? What happens to species and populations at the shifting ecotone between the Boreal and the Arctic or the forest treeline and tundra or alpine? Where do "Arctic" species at their southern range-limits or alpine species at their elevational limits disperse, do they adapt, or do they go locally extinct?
I use citizen scientists to help answer some of these questions. This effort now includes the fjällkalendern project developed in collaboration with Naturens kalender, the Swedish National Phenology Network. Here citizen scientists track plant phenology in the Swedish Mountains. Importantly, this project has two aims, engage the public through participitory science to help them understand how scientists conduct climate change research and finally as a method to collect data from a very large region!