INTERNSHIP: Slovenian Forestry Institute

Hello IFSA world!

I am Šimon from Czechia and an active member of IFSA since 2017. I would like to tell you a bit about my internship experience at the Slovenian Forestry Institute from the summer 2020 that I was luckily able to conduct despite the pandemic of Covid-19.

Already since December 2019 I started to send out motivation letters and CV to different forestry related institutions all around Europe to find an internship for summer 2020. From most of them I haven’t even got an answer, but luckily, they accepted me where I wanted to go most – Slovenia. More precisely Slovenian Forestry Institute located in Ljubljana but conducting research all around the country.

Under the supervision of Dr. Tine Grebenc from the Department of Forest Physiology and Genetics, I have been engaged in varied activities. During the first half of the stay, my time was equally divided between the field work, laboratory and office; the second half was mostly interior. In the field I helped researchers from different departments for example with the assessment of Natura 2000 habitats, measurements of regeneration success, soil sampling within the LIFE IP Care4Climate project, measurements of root systems and a couple of others.

The work in the laboratory was especially beneficial for me since I haven’t had many opportunities to get hands-on experience in this environment throughout my studies up to date. The main content of these activities was connected to the molecular identification of ectomycorrhiza. I went through the samples preparation, DNA extraction, amplification via PCR techniques to latter DNA purification and sequences analysis.

In the office I mostly worked on a research of identification of relations between varied factors influencing mushroom and truffle legislation in the European countries. Data was collected from key informants from different countries all around Europe and the data analysis in R was supposed to follow. For this purpose, I got an introduction to the R software functioning and started with basic analysis of the data.

Among other activities I passed during that period July to September, I am very grateful for seeing truffle plantation management in practice, and a brief course on scientific and professional papers writing and presentation. All in all, it was a fruitful period that I will be able to build on in the future.