Funding agencies can prevent harassment

In Science, I've written a letter together with Mette Bendixen as a response to the vast amount of stories and research on harassment in academia.

The letter propose that funding agencies have the power to be a part of this highly necessary shift in the academic culture. By incorporating code of conducts for acceptable behavior from their grant recipients, they are forced to integrate safety standards into grant proposals. 

The story got some attention through an interview in the Danish academic news outlet uniavisen.dk

We hope that this letter would start a debate and make grant recipients aware of the responsibility they share with the rest of the academic community.

Read the Article HERE

Field work in pictures

The field season of 2017 is long over, most of the memories from this summer is now stored in data tables or as graphs in manuscript drafts. Reflecting on the fieldwork conducted is a great escape from a rainy December evening and a reminder of the commitments aviating next year! Justifying collecting and preserving thousands of aquatic insects is their contribution to the higher research questions originally motivating (and funding) the field work. A field campaign is first complete once the paper is written and accessible to the broader community.

A major aim of the year was to create a baseline dataset from a cluster of ponds created by World War II bomb creators at a coastal meadow near Copenhagen. This included seasonal temperature logs, daily oxygen/temperature stratification across the season, sampling of aquatic insect communities and other classic environmental descriptor measurements. Furthermore, a project on sexual conflicts in diving beetles was continued for the second year in a row. During an intense two weeks field campaign more than 50 lakes were visited along a gradient from central Sweden to north of the polar circle.

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Thoughts about Greenland's unexpected natural resources.

This week in Science Mette, Irina, and I highlight some of the recent advances in the understanding of fluvial deposits along the coast of Greenland and how this could be an otherwise unknown sand source to the global market.

With this comment, we propose that sand-extraction in selected sites in Greenland could contribute to the global need for sand while developing the national economy and strengthen Greenland’s independency from Danish subsidies.

It should be stressed that If Greenland is to benefit from sand extraction, we must raise awareness about the resource both locally and globally, the Greenlandic people must learn best practices to extract the sand, and the industry must guarantee that extraction methods minimize potential negative impacts on the local environment.

Greenland's rivers alone deliver 8 % of the global budget of fluvial transported suspended sediments. @Nicolaj Krog Larsen