Current projectsPlease contact me if you are interested in collaborating on any of these projects!
BLUE LEADS GREEN:
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Optimizing digital tools for balancing forest productivity and water quality when managing drained boreal forestsSwedish Research Council FORMAS Mobility Grant, 2019-2023
I re-located to Luke in Helsinki to work in the Water Quality Impacts Unit with Mika Nieminen from October 2019 - March 2020. In this continuing collaboration I am researching methods to best manage forest drainage ditches to better balance water quality and forest production. Main applicant: Eliza Maher Hasselquist An unmanaged forest ditch in a 120 year old spruce forest.
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BIO-REACTBiochar reactors to purify forest runoff water in managed peatland forests - efficiency of novel biochar feedstocks
Skogssällskapet 2021-2022 We tested a potential method of filtering ditch waters in the lab and field using emerging biochar source materials. Main applicant: Eliza Maher Hasselquist, coapplicants: Michael Gundale, Marjo Palviainen (University of Helsinki), Virginia Mosquera (PhD student), Hjalmar Laudon Link to project page at funder's website here. Biochar in a ditch draining a recent clear-cut.
REFORM WATERReducing the Effects of FORest Management to inland WATERs - Collaboration among researchers from Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Ireland
EU Water Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) 2018 JOINT CALL, 2019-2023 You can find the project webpage here. Collaborator Jukka Pumpanen and a student extracting a soil core for incubation study.
Virginia (Vicky) Mosquera is the PhD student from Sweden - via Guatemala - that I'm am co-supervising on this project.
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Ecological restoration of waterways and riparian zones
The effect of ecological restoration of degraded streams, and particularly on the effect of restoring the stream on the adjacent riparian zone, was the main topic of my PhD. I found that it takes >25 years for restored streams to recover plant species diversity (Hasselquist et al. 2015) and nitrogen cycling (Hasselquist et al. 2017) in these boreal systems. I also studied the response of three groups of instream organisms to restoration of geomorphic complexity and found that a combination of restoration measures targeting not only sediment size heterogeneity, but also features such as step-pools and instream wood, is most likely to benefit benthic biota in streams (Hasselquist et al. 2018). I would love to continue to study these once timber-floated streams again in the future, but do not have any current projects associated with restoration of large streams. I do credit this work to giving me an appreciation and interest in riparian zones and their important role they play as buffers to adjacent land use.
I've recently started working with ecological restoration of ditches in unproductive peatlands back to more natural conditions at Trollberget Experimental Area where ditches that were dug to try to increase tree growth were unsuccessful. Here we are using a side-by-side comparison of the effects of management of old forest ditches on water quality: cleaning vs. ecological restoration. I'm actively participating in the GRIP on LIFE Integrated project in collaboration with The Swedish Forest Agency (Skogsstyrelsen), the County Administrative Board (Länsstyrelsen) of Västerbotten County, and many others, to study the effects of this restoration on biodiversity, downstream water quality, and greenhouse gases. I have two PhD students that I'm co-supervising that are using this areas as a field site: Virginia (Vicky) Mosquera and Shirin Karimi.
I've recently started working with ecological restoration of ditches in unproductive peatlands back to more natural conditions at Trollberget Experimental Area where ditches that were dug to try to increase tree growth were unsuccessful. Here we are using a side-by-side comparison of the effects of management of old forest ditches on water quality: cleaning vs. ecological restoration. I'm actively participating in the GRIP on LIFE Integrated project in collaboration with The Swedish Forest Agency (Skogsstyrelsen), the County Administrative Board (Länsstyrelsen) of Västerbotten County, and many others, to study the effects of this restoration on biodiversity, downstream water quality, and greenhouse gases. I have two PhD students that I'm co-supervising that are using this areas as a field site: Virginia (Vicky) Mosquera and Shirin Karimi.