Grant report: ECR seminar on Arctic/alpine plant traits

First, we want to thank OIKOS for the funding for this event. It was very successful, and we would not have been able to have this seminar without that funding.

The event was organized by visiting researcher Ragnhild Gya (postdoc from University of Bergen) and senior lecturer Anne Bjorkman at the University of Gothenburg on the 1st and 2nd of October with a lunch-to-lunch seminar. There were 54 attendees and out of those, 33 participants were online. The majority of the participants were PhD students (34), followed by 8 postdoctoral fellows and 7 researchers, 6 master students and 2 senior researchers. We had 22 participants from Sweden, 9 from Finland, 8 from Norway, 3 from Denmark, 2 from Germany, 2 from Switzerland, 2 from Iceland, 1 from Scotland, 1 from Korea, 1 from Nigeria, 1 from USA, 1 from Austria, 1 from South Africa.

The seminar led to fruitful discussions between participants. There were presentations from 5 early career researchers, and one from established researcher Anne Bjorkman about opportunities for collaboration using big datasets. There were plenty of opportunities for networking over lunch, fika, breaks and dinner. The participants online were organized into breakout rooms and had networking options there as well. Although we acknowledge that this cannot fully replicate the opportunities of being at such an event in-person, the people online were very active and thanked us for making this a hybrid event.

All in all, this event led to the networking between early career researchers within the field of Arctic/Alpine plant trait ecology across the Nordic countries. Although the event was situated at the University of Gothenburg there was a good representation of ECRs from other countries and other cities within Sweden. We discussed options for continuing this group we have already made a slack channel for discussions, we are discussing if we should starts a journal club and/or an online meeting series and maybe organize a meet-up before the next OIKOS conference.
We thank the Nordic Society Oikos for this opportunity and we hope that the option to apply for funding like this will continue so that others can have the same opportunity as us.

This seminar was funded by the NSO Early-Career Research Grant 2024.