Longer daylight hours and milder temperatures means optimal snow covered fieldwork time. A number of CHARTER project reseachers are undertaking fieldwork periods this week. Temperatures are mild at this time of year in northern Scandinavia, currently in the -8 to +2 degrees range during the day and -15 to -8 overnight. The melting and refreezing of the snow surface makes a hard surface on which travel and movement for people, machines and animals much easier. However, this week the forecast is for mostly snowy and cloudy weather, which is not ideal for drone operation and photography.
CHARTER researcher Leena Leppänen who divides her work time between CHARTER and FMI (the Finnish Meteorological Institute) is this week out on Lake Inarijärvi. While this is actually FMI work, Arctic Science Centre staff will be documenting this work for content that will feed into a planned CHARTER science exhibit on the effects of ‘rain on snow’ on plants, animals and people.
Also in northern Finland, Timo Kumpula (Uni of Eastern Finland, Work Package 1 and 2) is in familiar fieldwork area for his team, the border region between Finland and Norway in the municipality of Enontekiö. Timo and team are doing maintenance on fieldwork structures currently in place, installing an Eddy Covariance tower and an albedo station. They also hope to doing drone flight transects, but the weather does not currently look promising.
Also in Lapland, in the village of Savukoski, Salla Eilola of the Uni of Turku and others are meeting with locals to introduce their work with Maptionnaire (a community engagement mapping platform) and work with locals on content.
Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Hans Tømmervik (of NINA, Work Package 1) and others are currently looking at snow conditions near Tromsø, Norway and in the Saarivuoma sameby in northern Sweden.
Last week, Sirpa Rasmus and Minna Turunen and others ran a stakeholder workshop with locals in Inari under the guise of the CHARTER project and CLIMINI project. Also last week, Sirpa Rasmus, Otto Habeck with support from Simo Sarkki ran a gamification session on future scenarios for reindeer herding in Lapland with students of the Lapland University of Applied Sciences.
Finally, an important new publication was published in the journal Environmental Evidence this week. Entitled What evidence exists for temporal variability in Arctic terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity throughout the Holocene? A systematic map protocol. A Work Package 4 product, the paper was lead authored by Andrew Martin, with Jakob J. Assmann, Richard H. W. Bradshaw, Mari Kuoppamaa, Niina Kuosmanen, Signe Normand, James D. M. Speed & Marc Macias-Fauria. You can read and the download the paper here.
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