Statement
How I got here, and why I stayed
The longer answer, for anyone who is deciding whether to work with me.
I did not set out to spend three decades in the same forty hectares of spruce. I came to Storbäcken for one field season in 2004 to weigh some logs, and I am still weighing them.
I grew up in Trøndelag, in a valley where the forest was worked rather than admired, and I took a degree in Bergen because it was the furthest I could get from a chainsaw and still study trees. That lasted until my first proper field course, when a supervisor handed me a soil auger and told me to find out what was under the moss. What was under the moss turned out to be most of the carbon.
My doctorate was on deadwood: how long a fallen spruce takes to disappear, and what decides the answer. I marked logs in 1998 and 2004 and have been going back to them ever since. The half of the work nobody photographs is the half that matters - a tape, a density hammer, and a notebook that has to survive rain.
When Bengt Åkerlund retired in 2016 he left me the plot network he had started in 1994 and the twelve notebooks that came with it. Inheriting a long-term dataset is a peculiar kind of gift: you cannot change the protocol without breaking the series, so you are bound to somebody else's decisions for the rest of your working life. I have kept every one of them, including the ones I would not have made.
What I have added is openness. Every plot record from 1994 onward is now archived, cleaned and public, with mistakes annotated rather than quietly corrected. If somebody re-analyses it and finds I was wrong, that is the system working. The plots outlast all of us; the job is to hand them on in better order than we found them.
You cannot change the protocol without breaking the series, so you are bound to somebody else's decisions for the rest of your working life.
How the year runs
One working year
The same shape every twelve months. That repetition is the whole reason the series holds together.
September - October
The remeasure
Six weeks on foot with two students and a field assistant. Every plot, every marked stem, every log. Nothing is skipped because the weather is bad: skip one year and the series is worth less for the next thirty.
Produces
1,240 plot records, in pencil
November - December
Bench work
Cores dried, weighed, sieved and burned. The slow half nobody photographs, and where almost all the errors would enter if the protocol let them. Two people weigh, and the balance is calibrated every morning.
Produces
Soil carbon and bulk density
January - March
Entry and checking
The notebooks are typed up twice by different people and the two versions compared. Every disagreement is resolved against the paper, never against the spreadsheet, and anything the paper cannot settle is flagged rather than guessed.
Produces
A clean, versioned dataset
March - June
Analysis and writing
Where the papers get written, the grants get applied for and the students defend. Also where I teach, which is not a coincidence: the course material comes out of the same year's numbers, while they are still fresh enough to argue about.
Produces
Two or three manuscripts
July - August
Maintenance
Plot markers repainted, boardwalks repaired, loggers serviced, the archive deposited. Entirely unglamorous, and the only reason the plots are still findable after thirty-one years.
Produces
A network that still works
Methods
What I can actually do
Grouped by where it happens, with the qualifier that matters instead of a score out of ten.
In the field
- Soil coring to 60 cm since 2004
- Litter traps and decomposition bags since 2004
- Flux chambers, static and dynamic since 2019
- Deadwood density and decay class since 2004
- Dendrometer bands since 2011
- Water table dipwells and loggers since 2019
In the laboratory
- Loss-on-ignition and elemental analysis routine
- Bulk density and particle size routine
- Wood density by X-ray densitometry since 2014
- Fungal community sequencing with a collaborator
- Stable isotopes 13C and 15N
With the numbers
- R fifteen years, badly at first
- Mixed and repeated-measures models lme4, brms
- Bayesian change-point analysis since 2020
- Geospatial work QGIS, sf, terra
- Reproducible pipelines targets, git, tested
Everything else
- Grant writing nine funded, eleven not
- Doctoral supervision seven completed
- Field course design and delivery since 2013
- Data stewardship FAIR, DOI-minted, versioned
- Norwegian, Swedish and English all three daily
Funding
Who pays for this
Awarded, held and accounted for. A long-term plot network costs about what one postdoc costs, forever.
| Body | Award | Role | Years | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nordic Research Council | Boreal Carbon Programme | Principal investigator | 2023-2027 | 14.2 M SEK |
| Vinter Foundation | Long-term plot infrastructure | Principal investigator | 2021-2026 | 8.6 M SEK |
| Nordic Research Council | Peatland rewetting, paired mires | Co-investigator | 2019-2024 | 6.1 M SEK |
| Nordvik University | Doctoral position, deadwood fungi | Supervisor | 2022-2026 | 3.4 M SEK |
| European Forest Network | Deadwood synthesis working group | Work package lead | 2020-2023 | 1.9 M SEK |
| Held and administered since 2019 | 34.2 M SEK | |||
Values are the sum awarded, not the sum spent, and none of it is confidential. Eleven other applications in the same period were unsuccessful; those are on the CV.
Plates
The sites, as they look
Numbered and captioned, because a photograph without a caption is decoration.
