Last week, Holger Villwock from the SITES Secretariat took the chance for a short summer break from the office work to visit the SITES station in Skogaryd. The goal was to better understand the installations behind the data which are currently structured for uploading on the SITES Data Portal and also to work on data to prepare the upload. Leif Klemedtsson the station manager and thematic programme coordinator of SITES Water provided a guided tour through all installations and informed in depth about the monitoring infrastructure and historical background.

The SITES team around Gunhild ‘Ninis’ Rosqvist and Pia Eriksson has successfully finished the recent monitoring campaign near the Kebnekaise massif at Tarfala Research Station.  

View towards the Kebnekaise summits from a helicopter. Photographer: Gunhild Rosqvist.
 

As in previous years, staff from Grimsö Wildlife Research Station is busy running external projects at the station and data collections within the base monitoring program during June. Among the latter, it is now peak season for controlling red fox (Vulpes vulpes) dens, but also to support external projects that monitor reproductive success of other species such as the lynx (Lynx lynx).

On Friday the 12th of June, the SITES Water coordination team received the horrible news about a fire that happened in the TEMA laboratory which is under the umbrella of Linköping University and David Bastviken. First results of the investigation indicate that the fire started during the night from Thursday to Friday that week. Luckily, no one got injured during the incident, but significant damage to especially the field equipment and the workshop occurred.

Since last week, Tarfala Research Station has opened for the spring season. The weather during this time of the year is difficult to predict in the mountain peaks in the north of Sweden and it might happen that the researchers face week-long snowstorms. This year the sunny conditions have kept the team very busy in maintaining the long-term monitoring infrastructure.

Vi på SITES önskar alla
en fin midsommar!

During the last months, a substantial progress has been made to develop a robust data structure for the different layers of the thematic programme SITES Water. The goal is to make it possible for all stations within the infrastructure to upload their data deriving from the individual monitoring campaigns into the same templates. The challenges about this work lie in the well-established, pre-existing long-term monitoring of each individual station before the start of SITES.

The instrumentations for SITES Water on Almbergasjön in Abisko are being installed at the moment. A central part of the monitoring are the measurements deriving from the floating platform. Here, weather data, water temperature profiles, oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations in the water are measured throughout the open water season to capture seasonal changes and the impact of the warming climate on limnic systems in the sub-arctic.

This spring Shangharsha Thapa, a master student at Lund University, has validated SITES Spectral data for his thesis under the supervision of Dr. Virginia Garcia and Prof. Lars Eklundh. Shangharsha is originally from Nepal where he has studied Geomatics Engineering at Kathmandu University.

The Erken Laboratory has this week started its greenhouse gas  flux campaign. By using floating chamber devices, the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N20) from limnic systems are measured at different transects on lake Erken. These novel chambers are developed by David Bastviken and his research team at Linköping University.