In October, 12 PhD projects were approved in an internal call at SLU’s Faculty of Forest Sciences. Now, three more projects have secured funding.
The Wallenberg Initiatives in Forest Research (WIFORCE) is a research program running at SLU’s Faculty of Forest Sciences until 2030. The program, which includes a research school with over 50 PhD students, is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
In October, 12 PhD projects were selected in a call targeting fundamental natural sciences, focusing on investigating how abiotic and biotic factors influence the prerequisites for, and consequences of, forest management in Swedish forests.
During the review committee’s meeting, a list of three reserve projects was established. Thanks to additional funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the steering group can now approve the PhD projects on the reserve list.
“This is fantastic news, as more important projects will now have the opportunity to be realized,” says Hjalmar Laudon, program director for the WIFORCE research school.
The approved projects are:
- Aino Hämäläinen at the Department of Ecology, for the project Surveying the diversity of forest-dwelling lichens and bryophytes with airborne eDNA
- Igor Drobyshev at the Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, for the project Pyrogenic carbon as a missing sink in the global carbon cycle: calibrating the sediment records to historical fire regimes
- Thomas Ranius at the Department of Ecology, for the project Impacts of landscape heterogeneity shifts and climate warming on insect biodiversity dynamics in production forest landscapes
