Around 30 people met up at Tiraholm hotel for the annual partner meeting for Bolmen Research station. The partner representatives came from the municipalities around the lake Bolmen, the Regions around the lake, local County Administrative Boards, the hydropower company Statkraft, the Lagan River water council, Bolmen Fishing Association, the Swedish Forest Agency, and SITES.
Tiraholm hotel (left) and an overview of the Bolmen Research station partners (right). (Photo: Juha Rankinen)
Mattias Leijon, the new CEO at Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd, presented the company’s vision and work focusing on the new strategic goal to decrease drinking water usage by 2% annually until 2040 as a way to implement the global sustainable goals 6, 14 and 15. He also explained how important Bolmen is for the citizens living in the south-west of Skåne. As well as upcoming work to create redundancy in the whole drinking water chain from the lake Bolmen to each household in Skåne and how this work will increase the importance of the well-being of the lake now and in the future.
Left: Mattias Leijon, CEO Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd (Photo: Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd). Right: Juha Rankinen, Bolmen Research Station manager, pictured on the AquaNet platform (Photo: Moa Palmgren).
Juha Rankinen, station manager at Bolmen Research Station, took over after Mattias and spoke about the station’s work during 2023, which covered the work within SITES and last year’s development, integrating the station into SITES Water. He also spoke briefly about the SITES AquaNet/AQUACOSM experiments during 2022 and 2023.
The talk also highlighted last year’s Water Conference at Tiraholm, which will be held every other year going forward, and ended with a presentation of the Think H2O! project. The project, which has been running since 2014, invites between 800-900 upper secondary high school students to Tiraholm and the research station for 2-day water courses. It has led to one PhD student in the field of psychology and an outdoor education book for elementary schools written in collaboration with the Swedish Forest Agency as part of Grip on Life.
Clemens Klante, the new research leader at Bolmen Research Station, talked about the plans for a meteorological station at Tiraholm, which is a project in cooperation with the hydropower company Statkraft and the landowners of Tiraholm. He also spoke about the upcoming NOM meeting at Tiraholm April 11-12, which will gather the top researchers in Sweden focusing on the topic of lake brownification, and ended by highlighting an upcoming research project together with Halmstad University, Region Halland and the Swedish Forest Agency.
Left: Clemens Klante, research leader at Lake Bolmen Research Station , Middle: Christian Alsterberg – Research leader at Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd , Right: Kenneth M Persson – Head of Research & Development (All Photos: Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd)
The meeting ended with Christian Alsterberg, research leader, and Kenneth M Persson, head of Research & Development at Southern Sweden Water Supply Ltd, who presented thoughts and ideas for a management plan for Bolmen derived from the successful work at the lake Vomb (Fokus Vombsjön) and invited all participants to start thinking about how such a plan could be implemented.