News from Lönnstorp
Finally! After a lot of bureaucracy, the process of getting high-speed internet to SITES Lönnstorp was started up a couple a days ago. If everything goes well, we will have access to fast speed internet at the end of the year. This upgrade will hopefully enable those of us that are associated with projects at SITES Lönnstorp to use the field station as our place to work from, which will in turn most likely enhance communication between researchers and technicians. In addition, this upgrade of internet capacity will hopefully allow us to get more projects to the research station.
In early August, Eamon Gallagher started his position as a field technician at SITES Lönnstorp. Eamon, who has previously worked at both Yara AB and Hasselblad, will mostly work with tasks related to SITES. Among other things, he and Ryan Davidson will take care of collecting spectral data and make sure that the SAFE experiment is well managed.
In recent months, we have had the pleasure of welcoming a lot of visitors to SITES Lönntorp. In May, about 75 researchers attending the conference "Is the Future Perennial" were given a guided tour of the research station. In June, we had visitors from the Nordic Plant Phenotyping Network as well as and the DiverIMPACTS-project (a total of more than one hundred researchers). Furthermore, in collaboration with Partnership Alnarp, we also organized a “soil-carbon-day” in June. Farmers, advisors, government officials as well as researchers participated at this event. SITES Lönnstorp was also represented with a “roll-up” at the Borgeby agricultural fair.
The harvest of field trials at SITES Lönnstorp was initiated at the end of July. The season has been dry and therefore we had to start the harvest earlier than we would normally do. However, despite this, preliminary data shows that yield levels are relatively high.
Figure 1. The process to get high speed internet to SITES Lönnstorp has started!
Figure 2. Lars Eklund (Lund University) presents SITES Spectral at SITES Lönnstorp.