Northern Biodiversity Hotspots: taxonomy field courses

Intensive course extending over one week.

The course is limited to 15 students.

Biodiversity loss, often referred to as biodiversity crisis, is a global environmental problem causing international concern and demanding urgent counteracting measures. Biodiversity is commonly defined in terms of a number of species present in a particular environment, or in total in the world. This makes species not only one of the fundamental biological concepts but also a focus of global conservation efforts. That is why practical experience with morphology based species identification is in high demand in both basic and applied biological research.

During the year 2018 we offer two options for the field courses:

Option 1. "Flora of Skibotn, plant collection and identification", Skibotn field station, Troms, Norway, August 13-18. Skibotn area has a remarkably high species number for such northern latitudes (68-69 degrees N) challenging the general concept that species richness decreases as latitude increases. Daily excursions to both lowland and mountain habitats will be combined with practical work in the class to identify the collected materials using the identification keys and learn diagnostic characters of plant taxa.

Option 2. "Entomology hands-on: collecting, sorting, species ID", Station Linné, Öland, Sweden, September 2-9. The course aims to present several aspects of insect handling in field and in collections. Different methods and techniques for collecting, sorting, identifying, and preserving will be taught.  We will broadly cover different taxonomic levels, and provide some opportunities to dive deeper into some of them. Station Linné is coordinating the largest Malaise trap project ever run in Scandinavia: "SMTP", Swedish Malaise Trap Project, and preserved SMTP-material will be one of the parts of the course content.

See additional information about these two course options on ForBio webpages. They will be presented as separate courses.

ForBio members that are MSc-, PhD-students or PostDocs in Norway can have travel and living costs covered (contact ForBio) http://www.forbio.uio.no/events/

Local admission, application code 9371 - Master's level singular course.

Admission requires a Bachelor`s degree (180 ECTS) or equivalent qualification, with a major in biology of minimum 80 ECTS.

Language of instruction and examination

Oral exam. Examination will include identification of collected specimens (from the groups not mentioned during this course) using published keys in Norwegian or English. Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail.

There will be a re-sit examination for students that did not pass the previous ordinary examination.