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Prestigious funding for environmental research from the ERC will use SITES

David Bastviken, Professor at the The Department of Thematic Studies - Environmental Change at Linköpings University has received nearly 20 million via an ERC Consolidator Grant, a grant given to excellent research.
The goal of David´s project is to better quantify and develop models to predict methane emissions from lakes. Methane is an important greenhouse gas, and new research shows that the lakes are one of the largest sources of methane. By mapping how these natural greenhouse gases are regulated, and how sensitive they are to global warming, it becomes easier to make climate models.
The money is a great opportunity to build a strong research around this. Now, emissions in the lakes will be surveyed in a rigorous manner so that we can anticipate future emissions, says David Bastviken.
Facts:
ERC stands for the European Research Council and supports researchers in all scientific fields that conduct excellent research of the utmost quality. David Bastviken receives 2 million euros over five years.

The picture and text are translated from a news article at Linköping universitys homepage. 
Title and Abstract
Predicting future methane fluxes from northern lakes (METLAKE)
David Bastviken
 
The new global temperature goal calls for reliable quantification of present and future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including climate feedbacks. Non-CO2 GHGs, with methane (CH4) being the most important, represent a large but highly uncertain component in global GHG budget. Lakes are among the largest natural sources of CH4 but our understanding of lake CH4 fluxes is rudimentary. Lake emissions are not yet routinely monitored, and coherent, spatially representative, long-term datasets are rare which hamper accurate flux estimates and predictions.
 
METLAKE aims to improve our ability to quantify and predict lake CH4 emissions. Major goals include: (1) the development of predictive models, validated by extensive field data, and being suitable for use at the lake rich northern latitudes where large climate changes are anticipated in the near future, (2) the testing of the idea that appropriate consideration of spatiotemporal scaling can greatly facilitate generation of accurate yet simple predictive models, (3) to reveal and quantify detailed flux regulation patterns, and (4) - as a basis for the above goals - to generate more representative CH4 flux measurements. Extensive field work based on optimized state-of-the-art approaches will yield multi-scale and multi-system data, supplemented by experiments, and evaluated by data analyses and modelling approaches targeting effects of scaling on model performance. Altogether, METLAKE aims to advance our understanding of one of the largest natural CH4 sources, and provide us with systematic tools to predict future lake emissions. Such quantification of feedbacks on natural GHG emissions is required to move beyond state-of-the-art regarding global GHG budgets and to estimate the mitigation efforts needed to reach global climate goals.

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