FACE IT

On 28 May 2025, Cheshtaa Chitkara successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled "Arctic marine microbial eukaryotes–Spatiotemporal drivers of community structure and ecological impacts of Atlantification". Prior to the defense, Cheshtaa presented a trial lecture with the title “Mixotrophy in plankton: ecological concepts and evidence with examples from the Arctic”. 

On 06 February 2025, Luisa Düsedau successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled "Assessment of Macroalgal Biodiversity and Habitat Change in the European Arctic". Luisa worked within the FACE-IT project at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany).

EU-PolarNet co-coordinates the EU Polar Cluster and, hence, is connecting all EU-funded polar projects. Furthermore, EU-PolarNet developed polar research priorities in close cooperation with stake- and rightsholders over the past years.

On 20 September 2024, Sarina Niedzwiedz successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled "The Dark Side of Polar Day - The influence of coastal run-off on Arctic kelp communities". Sarina is working within the FACE-IT project at the department of Marine Botany at the University of Bremen, Germany.

FACE-IT is slowly coming towards its end. Yet, the whole team is still working on many different publications and many related activities. On 02 September 2024, the FACE-IT team held its official last annual meeting and general assembley at the campus of Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark.

On 06 May, FACE-IT project coordinator Kai Bischof (Marine Botany, University of Bremen) participated as ecpert in a panel on EU-US Arctic cooperation, hosted by the Polar Institute and the Global Europe Program of the Wilson Center (Washington DC, US) and co-organized by the European Union.

On 23 October 2023, Anaïs Lebrun sucessfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled "Responses of shallow arctic benthic communities to climate change". Anaïs is working within the FACE-IT project at the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche, LOV, which belongs to Sorbonne University.

From 14 to 17 May 2023, FACE-IT scientists involved in the research area Ecosystem Function Changes met at the field station of Aarhus University located at the Limfjord in Rønbjerg, Denmark.

Dr. Lill Rastad Bjørst from Aalborg University is one of nineteen scholars who will take part in a series of events held in Washington, D.C. from April 24-28, 2023 as part of the Fulbright Arctic Initiative. Scholars from the Arctic Council’s eight member states will present their research and policy recommendations, capping two years of research and collaboration.

Phytoplankton primary production is the base of the marine food web. Consequently, productive areas are often important for benthic ecosystems, as well as fishery. Northern Melville Bay, in Northwest Greenland is north of the currently exploited fishing grounds, but important for vulnerable benthic organisms, including corals, sea pens, and sponges.

CHARTER, ECOTIP and FACE-IT, three EU-funded projects that are researching on biodiversity in relation to ice loss in the Arctic, organized jointly with the EU Polar Cluster a policy briefing in Brussels on 15 March 2023.

The University Centre in Svalbard UNIS is running the northernmost high-frequent time series of plankton in the world studying the seasonal community development and biodiversity in Adventfjorden on the west coast of Svalbard. Since 2018, UNIS has expanded this timeseries to also cover the entire Svalbard archipelago by regularly sampling fjords in western, northern, eastern and southern Svalbard during summers using cruise ships as platform.

FACE-IT, ECOTIP and CHARTER, the three Horizon 2020 projects working on Arctic biodiversity and ice loss are conducting a policy briefing on 15 March 2023, 2 pm, in Brussels.

Halvor Dannevig from the Western Norway Research Institute is co-editing a new Research Topic in "Frontiers in Marine Science".

Four days full of information and getting to know new colleagues! The FACE-IT kick-off meeting took place from 23 to 26 November 2020.

Right at the start of the FACE-IT project, the wide public was invited to attend a colloquium: “The new Arctic: Ecological and societal transitions in glacial fjord systems”. On 25 November, from 3:15 pm CET, experts from Greenland,

With November 1, 2020, we started the EU project FACE-IT (“The Future of Arctic coastal ecosystems – Identifying transitions in fjord systems and adjacent coastal areas”). FACE-IT is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Kai Bischof and Dr. Simon Jungblut from the University of Bremen. Marine Botany Group at the Department of Biology/Chemistry of the University of Bremen and compares Arctic fjord systems at different stages of glacial and sea-ice retreat in Greenland, Svalbard and the Norwegian Finmark.