Matthias and Elin working together during the WP5 meeting in Sweden (Photo: M. Tomasik, Arctic Portal) Today's entry will treat about my research visit at the Vienna University of Technology that took place in December.

I am working at Stockholm University on the mapping of soil organic carbon and nitrogen storage in the Arctic. In this work we use soil pedon samples that we analyze in the laboratory for carbon and nitrogen content and combine this data with remote sensing products to upscale the information to larger areas.

 

My focus is on doing this at the local scale, but in Stockholm we also work all the way up to the Circum-Arctic scale. Fortunately we have Annett Bartsch and Elin Högström - two remote sensing experts in Vienna - to help us with this task and to provide us with some of the data that we need.

Therefor I went for one week to Vienna to work with Elin on this. Although the weather over Vienna was very gray when I arrived, I was very glad to get there. Elin and I started our PhD at the same time around one and a half years ago and we worked a lot together during this time. We have been to four different field sites together and we also did a lot of organizing for the PAGE21 Young Researchers together with Stefanie Weege from AWI in Potsdam. So it was great to see her again.

The goal that we set ourselves for this exchange was to work on how we can divide a permafrost landscape from a satellite image into meaning full units that we can later on use as classes for our soil carbon upscaling. For this we would mainly use high resolution satellite images of the primary field sites in PAGE21. While this work is done in Vienna, we in Stockholm are one of the main users of it and therefore it is important that we find a good way that benefits both of us. Hence I tried to bring in our soil focused perspective from Stockholm into this. As I also work on some very high resolution satellite imagery, it was a good opportunity to learn something and to coordinate with Vienna to reduce eventual overlap. And last but not least, the remote sensing products are of course a very important delivery for PAGE21 that is due soon.

On the first day the weather was very gray. Elin and I sat together with some cake and coffee and talked about where we are within our parts of the project and then looked were we would like to get within the next months. We than made our big plan for the week.
During this week I also did some intensive research into what Austria is world famous for: sweet pastry. So as Elin worked hard, I took care of the leftover "Mohnkuchen" (poppy-seed cake) in the department coffee room.

In the evenings Elin organized a tight entertainment program for me, consisting of rock climbing and dining with her friends. I focused on the later one. I can recommend every dish that ends on "-strudel".

 

 

Written by Matthias