This course is the field course in BIO250 Palaeoecology,
that we teach in the autumn semester in Bergen.
And the reason for going out here to Lygra is to actually do the fieldwork ourselves, to get a feeling of how fieldwork is done
what you have to think about, what you have to plan, what you need to bring,
and how you should choose your strategy when you have decided on your research question.
We're looking for charcoal layers to see if we can map the historical burning regime over time.
And maybe we're going to take another sample in another area to see if it's different in different locations.
We have to look for the charcoal layer and then also have a look for anything else that we can see.
Maybe evidence of trees if there were trees nearby on the site, because this could have been an old forest site or something.
We don't know yet, but we're going to find out. We will see how we can use the sediments or the peat in this case
as an archive for past landscape and vegetation changes or any kind of ecosystem change.
And we are going to look at pollen in the sediments
and by doing so we can see how the climate has changed.
and look at the differences before and after humans came and started cultivating the land.
I think they really like to kind of do it themselves and not only be shown on the video or as a demonstration on how you do it.
The russian corer is really hard to push down.
So we had to use a lot of manpower, or woman power.
We're taking cores from different depths, and when we get them up again, we're sort of looking at the different layers.
By doing that, we can say something about the vegetation of the past.
Then we are also doing lab analysis and are looking at pollens and grains.