Nansen Legacy in Canada – organizing food-web session and presenting research highlights

While it had the potential to be an unsuccessful endeavor (busiest time of the year; unknown territory, unknown community), it turned out to exceed even the most positive expectations.

It was an extremely inspiring, interesting, and instructive conference promoting inclusiveness through Polar pride and indigenous knowledge. Perhaps participants were especially enthusiastic as this was the first in-person meeting they had since the pandemic.

A wide range of topics, from “Atmosphere-sea ice-ocean interactions” to “Transforming approaches in environmental science in Arctic indigenous homelands”, were covered. The highlighting of and focus on integrating indigenous researchers and local knowledge into research projects was an especially big part of the ArcticNet annual meeting and a very positive experience. This also included screenings of films and documentaries and various ways of communicating science and storytelling.

Our small delegation was involved in organizing a session on “Food webs in changing Arctic ecosystems” with several excellent contributions and we had both oral and poster presentations that attracted a wide interest, since it was almost exclusively the only studies not conducted in the Canadian Arctic.

We were engaged in many discussions and perhaps made some new friends on the other side of the Arctic. One point that was particularly clear was that with the challenges that the Arctic is facing only collaborative efforts will be able to evaluate the consequences of and propose mitigations to accelerating climate warming. So perhaps with our representation of a small subset of Nansen Legacy research, we could inspire future Canadian-Norwegian collaborations. The only less than desirable experience of the conference was that none of Oliver’s contributions to the photo competition won a prize!