My work fouces on the restoration of biodiverse and valuable soils in transport construction projects. Topsoil is a non-renewable resource, which is inevitably lost when paving the way for new infrastructure. Meanwhile, moving and restoring these soils elsewhere can be an environmental compensation measure and contribute to restoring degraded nature.

Previously, I did my MSc in Natural Resources Management in biology at NTNU, which was funded by the interdiciplinary research project GreenMove (2022-2026), supervised by Bente J. Graae and Martijn L. Vandegehuchte. In short, I analysed the vegetation and topsoil response to topsoil translocation from a road construction site into the urban landscape of Høgskoleparken at NTNU. Not only did the project increase the biodiversity in the park, but also saved some of the doomed plant communities from degradation.

Now as a PhD within the same project, I have one leg at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the other leg at my former Department of Biology. Along with my main supervisor Rolf André Bohne and in co-supervision from SINTEF by Hrefna R. Vigdisdottir and Katrin Knoth, I analyse the step-by-step impact of soil relocation using life cycle analysis (LCA), both for agricultural and natural systems. The overall goal is to find more sustainable ways to manage soil in infrastructure projects for humans and nature, as the last resort effort to minimize human impact on the scarce agricultural soil and fragmented and degraded nature. 

Honors/awards:

Best presentation at the "First European PhD and Postdoc Symposium on delivering the future of Infrastructure Research", hosted by the Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR), 2024

Best Master thesis in sustainable development at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, 2023