On dead wood course preps and research stations

In Copenhagen, spring is the air, and instead of sorting my fishing lures, polyporing knives, and beetle jars, I started preparing for the Dead wood course 2020. The course will be arranged for the fifth time, and this is the fourth place and the third country where we have it, after Helsinki 2013, Lammi Biological station 2015 and 2016 (Finland), Voronezhsky biosphere reserve 2019 (Russia), and finally, we will go to the Espegrend marine biological station near Bergen, Norway.

New location is always a challenge (logistics? excursion? costs?), but with the excellent project team, and my deep trust in Scandinavian, or more accurately, Fennoscandian, efficiency, I am sure everything will go smoothly.

I am putting programme, teachers, and registration aside for now, and explore the location to give my thoughts some sense of place. I’ve been to Bergen and around two or three times, but not to Espegrend.

Thanks to the ForBio-inspired discipline, we’ve got our webpage ready, and there one can find the link to Espegrend. Reading & clicking further, one can find a slide show tour, here come just two highlights, the view…

Looks cool, right? Just the Norway of your dreams. Also, the classroom…

… looks cosy and ready to go.

I have to confess, I am a big fan of biological stations. Stations combine the comfort of roofed labs and shelter with access to fairly undisturbed nature; the station add an important feeling of focus to your work or study, and isolation from the routines of the more civilized world. The station is a terrestrial “research vessel”, your Calypso on land, with captain and crew, labs and sauna, canteen and library, and all you need. A new item comes to my collection of visited stations! It seems that only a few of my colleagues know that research stations form two very nice networks: INTERACT and OBFS.

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