Kari Austnes

Kari Austnes holds an MSc in environmental chemistry and a Ph.D. in biogeochemistry. Her research focuses on how climate change, landscape changes, and pollution from air and land affect water quality and the transport of substances through catchment processes. Key topics include dissolved organic matter (DOM), acidification, and nutrients, including land-coast interactions and substance budgets. She currently works mainly with long time series and large regional datasets, but she has also previously worked with lab and field experiments. She has strong knowledge of data analysis and databases and uses tools such as R and SQL. She has extensive experience with the use of sensor technology in monitoring and also works with catchment modeling. She has long experience as a project manager and works with research projects, monitoring projects, and assessments for management, the latter with topics such as liming, critical loads, and classification under the Water Framework Directive.

She has a broad international network, including work under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Here, she leads the programme centre for ICP Waters and is also the Norwegian representative in ICP Modelling & Mapping (units working on the effects of air pollution). She has worked for many years for the European Environment Agency (EEA) as part of the consortium now called The European Topic Center Biodiversity and Ecosystems (ETC BE). Here, she primarily works with analyses of ecological status and nutrient levels in rivers and lakes on a European scale, but also extensively with data collection and quality assurance as well as data visualisation on web platforms.