University of Helsinki
Matt, Luis, Lasse Ylianttila and myself participated in this meeting. All of us gave talks, and Lasse and myself taught at the worshop for ESRs on the day after the conference ended. The management committee (MC) meeting was on Monday. I took over from Lars Olof Björn the coordination of TG 1 “UV technology”. Lars Olof stepped down as leader for personal reasons. Lars Olof will replace me as assistant leader. Because I am now leader of TG 1, I stepped down as leader of working group 3 (WG3) and will be replaced by Riitta Julkunen-Titto.
There were about 100 participants in the conference (7 or 8 from Finland), including many of the most prominent researchers working on the effects of UV on plants. We made many contacts and had very interesting discussions. From the data presented in several talks, it is now clear that UVR8 is almost for sure the UV-B photoreceptor in plants.
In the conference Lasse talked about the calibrations and stray light corrections needed to take UV measurements with array spectrometers. He presented data from STUK’s Ocean Optics S2000 and our Ocean Optics Maya 2000 Pro. Matt presented his data on Nothofagus (both from his experiments in Tierra del Fuego and in Viikki). Luis presented some results on epidermal transmittance measured in Arabidopsis with our Dualex 3 FLAV. I presented our work on action spectra, from Titta’s, Luis’s and Sari’s experiments.
In the workshop Lasse gave a lecture on the pitfalls that one can run into when measuring UV-B. I gave a lecture on biological spectral weighting functions, biologically effective doses, and how to compare doses of UV from lamps and the sun. For the workshop practicals we took the Dualex and the Maya spectrometer to Szeged.
Szeged is a nice city and we managed to wander through the old city in spite of the packed conference programme. None of us took a camera to Szeged so we have no photos to post.