Oslo, 2020-12-20
Digital NETS 2020, the 8th Norwegian Environmental Toxicology Symposium, November 4-5.
The Norwegian Environmental Toxicology Symposium is a biannual conference gathering a broad representation of toxicologists within the ecological and environmental field of toxicology. The 8th symposium was supposed to be held in Bergen in April, but was postponed and moved to a digital platform due to covid-19 restrictions.
The main topic and title for this year's symposium was "Ocean Health in the Anthropocene", and although the MULTICLIM is indeed a highly terrestrial project, our presentations were very welcome and we got some much valued feedback as well as being able to do some networking.
Our project leader Katrine had a keynote presentation in the emerging contaminants session, Sagnik presented his experiments with imidacloprid exposure effects on life history traits in Folsomia quadrioculata, and Heidi presented her pilot field experiment on the use of mesocosms toassess the effects on soil communities under field realistic scenarios.
https://www.uib.no/en/nets2020
Oslo, 2020-11-20
When most of Norway closed down on March 12th, The University of Oslo also closed its doors and we had to quickly arrange for taking care of experiments and springtail cultures in alternative ways. The most important for us now is to stay safe and avoid spread of the virus, but creative measures include moving some of our springtail populations to low maintenance soil cultures, setting up a lab at home, and rescheduling the experiments. Read the blog post on "the new normal" for the Borgå Ecotox group to see how we cope!
The public service broadcaster in Norway, NRK, had a feature on springtails on the 7th of April 2019. Something that looked like a walking carpet was observed and filmed by Marie Kristine Dinessen in Meløy, north of Norway. NRK contacted our PI, Katrine Borgå, and got some background info on our spectacular research animals:
https://www.nrk.no/nordland/_-det-sa-ut-som-et-vegg-til-vegg-teppe_-og-det-var-i-bevegelse-1.14503950 (in Norwegian)
MULTICLIM with project leaders Katrine and Hans Petter is interviewed by UiOs popular science magazine, Apollon (2/2018). The article is in Norwegian, but you can find an English summary on our blog.
Starting up the project in April this year, we held a two-day kickoff seminar to get the wheels rolling. Read about it in this blog post.