Aoife is a PhD student at Imperial College London, studying interactions between bumblebees and plants and how they are affected by varying climates.
Supported by the Society's Geographical Fieldwork Grant, she recently completed a fieldwork expedition to a mountain in Arctic Sweden with Suzi Egleston and Lucia Hudson. With regular hikes up Mount Nuolja, they examined the size of the modern bumblebee and flowering-plant populations, and some biomarkers of change (like the timing of seasonal events). Using their contemporary data, they could compare their insights against data collected by historic researchers in 1970, to study how bumblebees are changing.
