Fulbright Finland News Magazine
In mid-November, the window of Eugenie Euskirchen’s office in Rovaniemi showed molten, black soil on the ground outside. Everyone in town was talking about the miserable weather, but biogeochemist Euskirchen had her own reasons for watching what was happening.
As a Fulbright Finland awardee, she had come from Alaska to Rovaniemi to continue research which included extreme events in Arctic climate, and if exceptionally warm weather in Lapland continued even longer than this, one would begin to be at hand.
“This is my sabbatical year,” says Euskirchen, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There she studies ecosystem dynamics of carbon, vegetation, water, and energy in taiga and tundra ecosystems. Now her office is in the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland in the Arktikum house.
“Fulbright is really a good vehicle,” says Euskirchen. She had made various plans for the sabbatical year. They didn’t include Fulbright, but she knew Arctic Centre’s Research Professor Bruce Forbes from years ago, whose fields of research are close to her own. After talking to Forbes, she sought this opportunity and succeeded.
Forbes came to Rovaniemi as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the 1990s and stayed on that path in Finland. Euskirchen arrived at the Arctic Centre in August and plans to be there until May, although the actual Fulbright term ends earlier.
“It is a great pleasure to host Eugenie as a Fulbright awardee. She has already seen quite a bit of Lapland and along the way gotten to meet several Finnish and Sami reindeer herders involved in my ongoing research projects dealing with extreme weather, like rain-on-snow. She is also significantly adding to her already broad and deep network of Arctic colleagues in the natural and social sciences,” says Professor Forbes.
Euskirchen is working with the carbon cycle in terrestrial Arctic ecosystems: how carbon uptake by plants and release from the soils will change when climate warms.
She has research sites in Alaska and she can use a comprehensive database put together by a colleague, Dr. Anna Virkkala, from the University of Helsinki and Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. She will work also with unpublished carbon flux data from both Virkkala and Professor Timo Kumpula, from the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. This work also includes a component that has to do with extreme weather events.
Adjusting to Rovaniemi has been easy. “The Arctic Centre is great. It has a really nice environment here,” she says.
There are many similarities between Rovaniemi and Fairbanks, and also between the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland and the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Not only are both research institutions found at roughly the same latitude, but they are about the same size and the main universities have many common features including an Arctic museum or science center.
“Eugenie’s expertise brings vital, added value to the Arctic Centre’s research on climate and environmental change. She has immediately become a full member of our work community,” adds Johanna Ikävalko, the Director of the Arctic Centre.
Seeking Solutions for Global Challenges Award is a grant program unique to the Fulbright Finland Foundation. Created to support the Foundation’s vision, it is awarded to scholars and professionals striving to find solutions to current and global challenges through their research, teaching, or professional projects. Eugenie Euskirchen (Associate Professor at the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks) is the sixth recipient of the Seeking Solutions for Global Challenges Award to Finland.
Read the whole Fulbright Finland News magazine 2/2024!
