The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Bergen (UiB) is responsible for the Marine Biological Station at Espeland (MBSE). The station is located at the fjord, Raunefjord, 20 km south of downtown Bergen (and the main campus of UiB) and close to the airport, Flesland, about 3 kilometres or 15 minutes away. The fjord systems around Espeland are considered a Scandinavian biodiversity hot spot. Additionally, the MBSE provide easy access to highly diverse and well-described marine habitats and model environments in the fjords.

The station comprises a boat, an equipment house, several open smaller motorboats, a larger research vessel (20 feet) and all basic equipment for marine field research. The Infrastructure on land includes multiple laboratories (chemistry lab, isotope minilab for 14C and 3H, live lab, formalin lab, 3 walk-in cold rooms with running seawater and light control, general lab equipment such as freezers and ovens, Milli-Q water, a cooled centrifuge, microscopes, etc.), a larger teaching lab and an auditorium, dormitories for up to 30 visitors, a large kitchen, and combined dining and living room.

The University of Bergen Mesocosm Centre (UIB-MC) is part of MBSE. It offers a wide range of opportunities for marine mesocosm experiments. The facility includes a floating platform with 12 enclosures in the Raunefjord (10-30 m3 each) plus 18 land-based outdoor mesocosms (2.5 m3), both located at UIB’s Marine Biological Station. A unique feature of the enclosures in the fjord is a floating raft that provides high-quality wet-lab space and electricity for immediate sample processing and lab-based measurements of samples. The mesocosm facility at MBSE was initiated in 1978 and has since been continued with few interruptions. This makes the mesocosms facility at MBSE the longest existing in the world entailing the longest experimental track record for mesocosm studies of pelagic ecosystems.

Due to the short distances to all kinds of biotopes and thanks to the equipment on board the research vessels, it is easy to carry living animals home to the aquarium at the marine station. Algae and deep-water animals can easily be collected and brought back to the laboratory alive, as many of them occur at quite shallow depths in the fjords and as the temperature of the surface water is low. Thus within 15 minutes of being collected, specimens can be transferred to the aquarium where they can survive for months, permitting studies of even their larval development. The proximity (15 min) to a large international airport also gives MBSE unique opportunities both in terms of short-term collection visits and remote access activities. A particularly important feature is that researchers have an opportunity to verify experimental results in settings of increasing complexity, ranging from laboratory-based studies to well-controlled outdoor mesocosms on land and enclosures in the fjord. In addition, experimental results can be compared with observational data from a wide range of natural pelagic environments, given that the Norwegian West Coast is the only place in Europe with close access to both coastal and oceanic environments.