Zuzanna Dunajska is one of the beneficiaries of the competition for funding student and PhD candidates mobility within the HarSval project. She received 10933 PLN funding for the spcialized course Climate Change Biology, The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), Longyearbyen.

Enjoy reading her report below:

“Thanks to funding from the HarSval competition, from 04.11 – 04.12. 2024r. I had the opportunity to participate in the course “Climate change biology” organized at the University Centre in Svalbard. The aim of the course was to learn about the biological consequences of climate change in the Arctic. The course provided a unique interdisciplinary understanding of climate change in the Arctic, combining biophysical and geophysical causes with the causes of climate change. The lectures were given by world-renowned specialists in the study of polar regions, and the course was led by professor Kit M. Kovacs, a marine biology specialist with many years of experience working with marine mammals. The lectures were divided into two parts. The first part dealt with terrestrial climate change, while the second part focused on marine climate change and the interactions between these changes and animals living in the Arctic region.

During the course, a variety of field activities were conducted: reindeer observation, learning about pingos and the ICING project. While working with reindeer, we observed reindeer in their natural habitat, collected their faces, which is needed for analysis of the C:N ratio indicating the quality of the reindeer’s diet, and analyzed their feeding sites. Pingos are dome-shaped hills that form in an area of permafrost when the pressure of freezing groundwater pushes up a layer of frozen soil. Observation of pingos and their surroundings is important because methane, one of the greenhouse gases affecting global warming, is extracted from these sites. The ICING project has been running since 2022, and its goal is to see how insects such as Collembola and Acari survive the winter in Arctic
conditions, with and without snow cover.

Participating in this course has been a valuable experience for me, providing me with extremely useful information about climate change and fieldwork in extreme Arctic conditions. I am confident that participation in the course will influence my further development in biological and chemical sciences and fieldwork skills.”