This Side of the Arctic
Research group of Frans-Jan Parmentier at the University of Oslo
Who We Are
We are a team of ecohydrologists that study the Arctic-Boreal carbon cycle. This vast region is warming more than three times faster than the rest of the world, causing earlier snow melt, intenser droughts, more frequent wildfires, and deeper permafrost thaw. We investigate how these rapid changes affect the flow of water and carbon through northern ecosystems, potentially triggering a release of greenhouse gases that worsen climate change.
Team members during fieldwork on Svalbard.
What We Do
We use a range of approaches to study the high North: through fieldwork across Norway and Svalbard, and by deriving new insights from satellite data with machine learning techniques. An overarching goal of our work is to advance the capabilities of the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) to simulate cold region ecosystems, and to project how high latitude climate feedbacks will develop in the future.
In our latest research project, SnowLess (2025-2028), we combine field measurements with lab experiments in a cold climate container to develop the demographic vegetation model CLM-FATES, which is part of NorESM. The aim is to simulate how shrubs and trees are damaged by extreme winter weather – in particular frost droughts and rain-on-snow events – and how this affects the exchange of water and carbon by northern ecosystems.
Team Members
Team Leader
Frans-Jan Parmentier is a senior researcher in ecohydrology who studies the flows of water and carbon in Arctic-Boreal ecosystems. For nearly two decades he has studied the Arctic through fieldwork in Northeast Siberia, Svalbard and northern Norway, with the analysis of remote sensing data, and by the use of land surface models.
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CV iconCurriculum Vitae
PhD Students
Anna Walsh-Vilander is a PhD Student in the SnowLess project, combining field measurements of the cold adaptation of Arctic-boreal shrubs and trees, and linking this to plant hydraulics in the lab. She will use these observations to improve the parameterization of CLM-FATES and to explore the impact of extreme winter events across northern ecosystems.
Alumni
Alexandra Pongrácz (PhD Student, graduated 2023) did her PhD on the representation of snow in LPJ-GUESS. She introduced a new multi-layer snow scheme into the model (Pongracz et al. 2021), with which she showed that climate warming will lead to contrasting shifts in snow depth across the Arctic-boreal region that control the strength of the permafrost carbon feedback (Pongracz et al. 2024).
Joel D. White (PhD Student, graduated 2023) did his PhD on the microbiological drivers of methane emissions in peatlands ranging from the southern edge of the Boreal region up to the Arctic. His work showed that methane-producing and consuming microorganisms show a high resilience to drought – despite reduced net methane emissions – since increased temperatures stimulate microbial growth of both communities (White et al. 2023).
Marius Lambert (PhD Student, graduated 2022) did his PhD on the modeling of the impact of extreme winter conditions on Arctic-boreal ecosystems. By implementing a cold hardiness scheme into CLM-FATES, he was able to more realistically simulate frost mortality (Lambert et al. 2023) and showed that the influence of cold adaptation on plant hydraulics is key to understanding plant survival in cold environments (Lambert et al. 2022).
Contact
Frans-Jan Parmentier
Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene
Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo
Postboks 1022 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
Page last modified: Feb 08, 2026