News archive

After many years of measurements in Almbergasjön in Abisko, SITES Water is being moved to a lake in Stordalen.

SITES Lönnstorp has recently acquired a new drone with spraying and spreading capabilities. The DJI Agras T10 has a liquid max load of eight litres and a spreader max load of six kilos, which doesn’t sound like much, but can be used in challenging situations where tractors are not an option due to difficulties with access or for treating field trials later in the season when a tractor would otherwise crush the crop.

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.

SITES Thematic programs are one form of collaboration, connecting individual stations in order to support and enhance research on both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as well as offering open data from long-term monitoring and experimental installations. 

SITES Spectral, coordinated by Lund University, is engaging new users for its infrastructure by offering open and free access to high-quality FAIR datasets. Concurrently, it is expanding research projects to support the advancement of the agritech industry in Skåne. This effort includes exploring synergies with local partners such as Agrodit, an innovative agritech startup located at Ideon Science Park in Lund.

The Erken lab has purchased a new instrument that can monitor seasonal changes in the lake’s phytoplankton. It was purchased with a grant from the Malmens foundation to Jorrit Mesman, a limnology post doc, who plans to use the data to improve the calibration of lake phytoplankton models.  Beyond that, we expect this monitoring will provide a valuable addition to our ongoing lake monitoring program.  The instrument makes use of a technique called delayed fluorescence (DF).

SITES Thematic Programs are one form of collaboration, connecting individual stations in order to support and enhance research on both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as well as offering open data from long-term monitoring and experimental installations. 

The ongoing work on estimating the discharge in the streams at Röbäcksdalens field station was initiated in the spring of 2023. At the time, the final phase of the snowmelt runoff was generating a peak stream flow. At Röbäcksdalen, a tracer is used to measure the discharge. The tracer is common table salt and it is injected (the mass balance method) into the stream, generating a dispersed cloud of conductivity change in the stream. The change in conductivity is then used to estimate the discharge.

This week SITES Water and SITES AquaNet field and lab techs met at Erken Laboratory for a joint workshop across the two Thematic Programs. The workshop focused on the current status and development of SITES Water and SITES AquaNet, along with sessions specific for the technical staff at the station. The sessions addressed life as field and lab tech, field and lab protocols, sensor calibrations, greenhouse sampling and hydrological measurements. The group also took a walk on ice-covered lake Erken for a hands on snow and ice measurement demonstration by the Erken staff.

At Erken Laboratory, the extensive year-round lake monitoring program on Malma Island provides valuable data to the global lake modelling community. Several Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) initiatives have utilized high-frequency data from Erken to understand lakes in a changing global environment.