Katrin Björnsdottir

About Katrin Björnsdottir

I am a PhD student within the EDGE lab group (edge-ecology.com) at the University of Gothenburg. My research is focused on how Arctic terrestrial ecosystems respond to environmental changes. In my work, I focus on plant communities, plant-soil interactions, and ecosystem carbon cycling processes. I am passionate about learning more about how our planet responds to the changing environmental conditions in a warming world and for that, in my opinion, the Arctic is the perfect place to work in. My work revolves around field work in extreme Arctic environments, where I spend my summers in Svalbard, Greenland, or northern Sweden, measuring plant functional traits, plant community composition, decomposition of plant material, and ecosystem carbon fluxes. During my PhD, I will combine data from field experiments as well as use big datasets within several networks to answer questions like - How does climate warming influence decomposition? Can we predict decomposition with plant functional traits? How will Arctic plant species cope with climate warming? And finally, what is the relative importance of plant traits and microclimate in driving the Arctic carbon balance?