Introductory seminar: "A story about Carbon, in the Arctic Tundra"

Focus for Blandine's PhD-project is to investigate the effects of climate change on the Arctic Tundra carbon cycle, by studying the whole biome and more local ecosystems and their two major compartments: the plant communities and the soil microbial communities.

Her main supervisor is Mats Björkman with Anne Bjorkman as co-supervisor and Cornelia Spetea Wiklund as examiner, all from the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. 

Brief summary

With climate warming, plants in the Arctic Tundra are becoming taller. They are therefore likely to take up more carbon from the atmosphere and contribute to climate cooling. At the same time, permafrost is thawing, freeing some of the carbon that was trapped there for centuries. And microbial communities are comfortably increasing their activity, likely releasing more carbon to the atmosphere and contributing to climate warming. Which process will win the battle? The answer is not straightforward, knowing how heterogeneous the Arctic Tundra is, and how complex biotic and abiotic factors intertwine. Via the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX), which consists of climate warming experiments ongoing for more than 30 years in the Arctic Tundra, I am trying to disentangle the different environmental factors driving ecosystem fluxes under warmer air temperatures.