Newsletter 
On the occasion of European Researchers’ Night, the French Institute in Finland is happy to welcome Helena Tukiainen, geographer and one of the French Institute Nordic Award winners (Prix FINA 2020), to speak about how the diversity of abiotic nature was considered in the IUCN World Conservation Congress which took place on 3rd-11th September 2021 in Marseille. She focus on themes related to World Heritage sites and mining industry.
The webinar will be held in English.
The event will be broadcast live on our Facebook page and then in replay on our Youtube channel
Biography
I am a geographer from the University of Oulu, Finland. My research focuses on the dynamics of geodiversity and biodiversity, and especially to their mutual relationships. In the current iGeoBio project which I work in as a postdoctoral researcher, we are exploring new empirical evidence for this relationship on different spatial and temporal scales. One of my key motivations to study this topic is to find new advantages for nature conservation, especially for halting the biodiversity loss in changing climate. Geodiversity, or the abiotic diversity of the earth´s surface (including variation in rock, soil, hydrology, topography and geomorphology) has conservation value itself but also a great potential to be used as a coarse filter strategy for biodiversity conservation. The FINA award offers me an excellent opportunity to attend to the IUCN conference, where I would like to share our findings about geodiversity- biodiversity relationships and discuss how geodiversity information could be utilized and considered in nature conservation.