Contributors

As a sound artist and scientist, I work with field recordings and interactive sound programming to create sonic experiences and hypothetical islands of immersion and reflection. Having lived in Finland for five years, I feel deeply connected to the Nordic environment and its peculiarities. This is one of the reasons why I am a proud member of the Finnish Bioart Society. For the Kilpisjärvi Science Trail I explored the sonic environment of the trails and their surroundings, where I noticed places where rocks, small ponds or streams gathered a relatively large variety of plants, mushrooms and animals. 

As a sound artist, I am interested in the biophony and soundscape ("how does it sound?") of such "microworlds" and enjoy sharing my findings and artistic interpretations with other trail visitors.

Find more information about Microworlds behind the link.

I work as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Oulu, Finland. I am currently focused on the CONTOURS project. This is a multidisciplinary research project looking at impacts of tourism on wilderness areas using walking methods for research interviews, and ecoacoustics. In our research project we are using sound to understand multiple aspects of the landscape. Read more about this research on the Sound research -page. Overall, my research is focused on understanding the complex issues which surround human-nature interactions and how they relate to the long-term success of conservation, especially in wild places. Methodologically I use a participatory approach, working with a range of in-situ visual and acoustic mapping tools. I am especially interested in how such methods can be integrated in a transdisciplinary way with long-term spatial and ecological data to deal with the growing challenges facing nature conservation. In recent years this research on walking methods, ecoacoustics, as well as 360° video, has taken place at sites in the Scottish Highlands, the French Pyrénées and the Swedish and Finnish Arctic.

I am a paleoecologist interested in long-term changes in northern climate and nature, currently working at the University of Helsinki. To understand and protect nature from climate change, it is important to understand their interactions in all timescales from centennia to millions of years. For over two decades now, my research team and I have developed and studied fossil and biogeochemical signatures of past environmental changes preserved in the bottoms of lakes and seas. We can find out how warmer climate affected ice cover, biodiversity or carbon sinks. It is fascinating to think that our familiar natural landscape: rocks, landforms, peatlands and lake bottoms, preserve so many unresolved messages from deep time. 

I am an emeritus professor of forest ecology, and have studied voles for more than 50 years. They are more like a lifestyle for me. My story with the voles began in the 1970s when I worked as a research assistant with vole research at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of University of Helsinki.

Currently, I work as professor of environmental research in Lammi Biological Station, but I have been working most of my career in Lapland research stations with focus on fish communities and lake food webs. I have been interested in fish since early childhood and this strong interest has remained since then. From the very beginning, I have been studying the underlying mechanisms in ecological speciation of whitefish, but more recently also with the impacts of climate change and lake productivity on fish and food webs both summer and winter using a range of different methods. Northern Lapland provides the best location in Finland to study lakes, their diverse fish populations and catchments areas with limited human impact. 

I am the leader of the research group "Physical Limnology" of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany. My research interests encompass physical processes in lakes: transport of heat, salt, and dissolved gases; small-scale turbulent mixing; lake-atmosphere interaction including lake response to global change. My special research focus is on cold lake environments. Since 2013, I have been studying Lake Kilpisjärvi. Owing to its unique geographic location, Kilpisjärvi and its neighboring smaller lakes have the longest ice-covered season in Western Europe. Surrounded by the fells, the Kilpisjärvi area can be called a "cold pole" of Fennoscandia: just 100 km further to the north, the climate becomes drastically milder due to the North Atlantic influence.  

I work at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki as Curator of the Paleontological Collections and I am a docent at University of Helsinki. I do research in marine paleoecology and paleobiology and have an interest for the history and philosophy of the earth sciences.

I coordinate Finnish common bird monitoring schemes and lead my research group the Helsinki Lab of Ornithology in the Finnish Museum of Natural History. I wrote my first bird observations in year 1987. I started my biology studies in 1999 and finished my MSc thesis about population dynamics and diet of the Great Cormorant in 2003. In my PhD thesis (2009), I studied impact of climate and food availability on timing of breeding and breeding success of eight bird species. I have been working in the Finnish Museum of Natural History since November 2009. I'm also an active at the Hanko Bird Observatory and board member of the European Bird Census Council and a member of the Finnish rarity committee of BirdLife Finland.

I am working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science at the University of Jyväskylä. My research focuses on plants, their interaction and how the changing climate affects the plants of the Arctic.

I am an aquatic ecologist doing my PhD at the department of biology at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany. My research focuses on emergent aquatic insects and their transportation of nutrients from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.

I work as Academy Research Fellow at University of Helsinki, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences (Lahti University Campus). I have a PhD in geography, and currently I am leading the NATUREWELL project funded by the Academy of Finland (2019–2025). In this multidisciplinary project, we study how outdoor recreation affects urban youth’s nature connection, well-being, and health. While younger generations’ alienation from nature has been discussed also in Finland, it is interesting to study youth’s nature experiences and the well-being benefits they receive from nature. We study not only the effects of nature contacts on the perceived well-being but also on human microbiota.

My background is in geophysics of snow and ice. I have studied snow cover structure in Finland, for example by digging a lot of snow pits, and impacts of climate change on snow conditions, by modelling. Nowadays I study the adaptation of northern livelihoods to climate change. The amount and quality of snow has great impacts on reindeer herding, for example. I find it fascinating how snow reacts rapidly to weather changes, it is different every winter, and also tells about long-term climatic changes. Snow is also a connecting topic in discussions with reindeer herders. They make similar observations, when they check the grazing conditions for reindeer.

I am a Finnish geographer and archaeologist and curious just about everything I encounter. Through out the years I have been occupied with whatever has paid my bills, most importantly the archaeology of pastoralist societies in Mongolia, East Africa and Fennoscandia, GIS and remote sensing applications in archaeology, the past of Lapland’s wilderness areas, and the archaeology of Karelian Isthmus, Russia. I have also been acting, for instance, as a field archaeologist, cartographer, surveying equipment salesman, and GIS engineer, for example in northern Siberia, Alaska, and Norway. Now I work at the University of Oulu, marveling numerous things past and present in various projects, such as the pasts of Arctic mining, heritage of Cold War in Svalbard, northern Fennoscandia and Siberia, and the archaeological traces of inequality lingering on the fringes of the Finnish welfare society.

I am currently a university lecturer in atmospheric sciences at the University of Helsinki, but previously I have been coordinating the Kilpisjärvi Science Trails project. I have spent my entire research life on studying interactions between the biosphere and atmosphere. The biosphere, and especially trees, emit organic compounds and some of these molecules can form small particles in the air which can grow and serve as cloud seeds. Clouds provide the only cooling effect of our climate, so understanding this whole pathway is super crucial in a time when the world is literally on fire. I am particularly interested in understanding how plant stresses (e.g. drought, flooding, heat, frost, air pollution and so on) impact clouds by plants changing their emission of organic compounds.

I am a physical geographer researching ecosystems and carbon sinks of the Arctic areas in a changing climate. In my research I utilize verstaile field research from Kilpisjärvi and other Arctic areas, as well as different remote sensing and statistical methods. Currently I work at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and carry out a modelling synthesis of carbon emissions of the Arctic-boreal area as a part of Permafrost Pathways -project, but I also collaborate with researchers from the University of Helsinki e.g. when it comes to the new carbon monitoring station of Kilpisjärvi.

Lichen, this symbiotic community of fungi, algae and bacteria, are models for cooperation. I am fascinated by the diversity of species and capabilities that this partnership facilitates. My research with the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Natural History Museum explores drivers of lichen diversity at multiple scales. What factors shape community composition? How do lichens react to anthropogenic disturbances? How can we use them as indicators in ecological surveys and ecosystem wide conservation?