Courses
What I teach
Two undergraduate, one master's and one doctoral course, with the years and the size of the cohort.
Boreal Forest Ecology
- Master's
- 15 ECTS
- 28 students
The course I built and still run. Six weeks of lectures and seminars, then two weeks on the plots doing a real remeasure that goes into the real dataset. Students find out quite quickly that field data is made rather than found, and that their own numbers will be checked.
Soils and Carbon
- Bachelor's, third year
- 7.5 ECTS
- 60 students
The large undergraduate course, co-taught with two colleagues. I take the carbon half and the laboratory. Everyone burns their own soil sample and then works out how badly they weighed it, which teaches more about uncertainty than a lecture on uncertainty.
Long-term Ecological Research: Methods and Ethics
- Doctoral
- 5 ECTS
- 12 students
A small doctoral course on what it means to be responsible for a series you will not live to finish. Half methods, half the awkward questions: who owns the notebooks, when is it legitimate to change a protocol, and what you owe the person who set the plots out.
Field Course, Västerbotten
- Bachelor's, first year
- 7.5 ECTS
- 45 students
Ten days in the forest with first-years, most of whom have never used a compass. Handed over in 2022 to a colleague who is better at it than I am, but it is still the course I am proudest of and I take a day on it every year.
The group
Who is in the group right now
Two doctoral students and a postdoc, each with a question of their own rather than a piece of mine.
Tuva Lind
Doctoral student
Fungal succession in Picea deadwood, and why the first coloniser decides everything after it
Ola Nyman
Doctoral student
Soil carbon in the first decade after clear-felling on drained ground
Dr Sanna Kekkonen
Postdoctoral researcher
Reanalysing thirty-one years of plot data with Bayesian change-point models
Supervision
What students ask before they write
Answered as honestly as I can manage, including the parts that put people off.
Do you take doctoral students?
Usually one every second year, funded through a project rather than a scholarship. Write before the call opens rather than after: the good projects get written jointly, and that takes a couple of months. Tell me which question you want to work on, not why you admire the group.
What is supervision actually like?
We meet weekly for the first year and fortnightly after that, and I read drafts within a week. You will spend at least two autumns on the plots, whatever your topic, because a person who has not measured the data should not be modelling it. I expect you to disagree with me in writing at least once.
Can I do a master's project with the group?
Yes, two or three a year, usually attached to a running project so the data is already coming in. The best ones start with a field season in September, so ask in the spring rather than in August.
Do you supervise remotely?
Co-supervision, gladly. Principal supervision, no - not for a field-based thesis. Too much of what I have to teach only happens standing next to somebody with an auger in their hand.
Anything not covered here: write, and say what you need in the first sentence. It gets a faster answer.
From the group
What they say about it afterwards
Two of the eleven, asked to be blunt.
She let me take the project somewhere she disagreed with, and then argued with me about it properly for two years. My thesis is better for the arguing and I have never worked with anyone who reads a draft that fast.
Dr Ola Nyman
Doctoral student, soil carbon after felling
Nordvik University
Supervised since 2023
The first thing she does with a new student is put them on the plots for six weeks. I resented it at the time. I now cannot imagine analysing a dataset I have not helped to collect.
Dr Sanna Kekkonen
Postdoctoral researcher
Nordvik University
Doctoral student 2019-2023, postdoc since 2024