Glaciers have long been considered almost lifeless environments, but this view does not correspond to reality. In recent years, they have been recognized as ecosystems in their own right, teeming mostly with microbial life, but also hosting larger organisms. Our current knowledge of glacier ecosystems is poor and fragmented. Most studies conducted so far focused on peculiar supraglacial habitats and were restricted to specific taxa. The course is organised in two locations, with field activities and some lectures at Santa Caterina Valfurva in the Italian Alps, and work in wet molecular laboratories, bioinformatics and statistics computer laboratories, practicals and other lectures at Milan University.

The focus of the course is to train young scientists with different backgrounds to interact with each other in planning and executing research projects aiming at identifying the ecological processes of supraglacial and proglacial ecosystems. The course will teach the reconstruction of ecological webs and other ecological relationships. It spans topics from sampling campaign and traditional morphologic classification of organisms to sequencing, bioinformatic and statistical elaboration of sequencing data.

The abstract submission and registration deadlines are 10 May 2022.

Full details are on the field course event page.