I am PhD student in biology. My project is a part of the bigger collaborative project IMPRESS that aims to improve the understanding of carbon sequestration in forest ecosystems, and build ecosystem models that will be able to better predict future carbon budgets at the national level.

Boreal forests play an important role in the global carbon cycling and have been identified as the primary terrestrial sink for atmospheric CO₂ globally.

The majority of this C is stored in soil pools. Fungi (saprotrophic - by decomposing soil organic matter, and mycorrhizal - by mobilizing plant nutrients) play fundamental roles in the ecosystem and regulate soil carbon sequestration. Our knowledge of fungal interactions on a molecular level (or of distribution of fungal species in different substrates) is rapidly increasing, but scaling up from molecular-level to the scale of ecosystems and landscapes represents a major challenge. My PhD project is aiming to understand how stand properties, such as nutrient availability and climate, shape fungal communities and their function,

 as well as effects of forest management. Cutting-edge molecular tools (454-sequensing, enzyme analyses and stable isotopes) will be used to derive information about fungal diversity and community composition. Novel isotopic techniques (¹⁴C bomb carbon modelling) will be used to estimate long-term carbon dynamics in soils. Multivariate statistics will then be used to yield correlative relationships between fungal communities and soil carbon dynamics. My study aims towards building a predictive statistical model of fungal community composition and its influence on carbon dynamic across the landscape.

Supervisors: Björn Lindahl (main), Karina Clemmensen (Department of Forest Mycology and Pathology) and Erik Karltun (Soil and Environment)