Finally, autumn has also come to SITES Lönnstorp with several nights below zero. The focus in the near future will be to harvest sugar beets and also to start the second year's measurements of nitrous oxide in the Residuegas project. This project uses the SAFE (SITES Agroecological Field Experiment) infrastructure and investigate how different crop residue management strategies affect nitrous oxide emissions. Read more here!








This year, SITES Lönnstorp took over the management of two long-term experiments in northwestern Scania that investigate the possibility of using various integrated weed control strategies to reduce Black grass (a problematic weed) in crop rotations dominated by winter cereals. The experiments were started in 2012 and 2015 respectively and compares five different weed control strategies that include different combinations of plowing, herbicides, direct sowing and reduced tillage. Preliminary results indicate that strategies that include direct seeding reduce the seed bank and the incidence of Black grass. However, the experiment needs to be continued during a number of years in order to confirm these preliminary results. Read more here!

The Formas project "Phosphorus efficient agriculture with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi" is a new project from Lund University that also uses the SAFE infrastructure at SITES Lönnstorp. The project will, among other things, investigate whether perennial crops (e.g. the wheatgrass Kernza) take up more phosphorus with its larger root systems than its annual counterparts (e.g. winter wheat) and whether these larger root systems also can maintain a higher mycorrhizal biomass. Equipment to study this was placed in SAFE in mid-October 2019 and will be assessed after harvest 2020. Read more here!

Together with researchers at Uppsala University and SLU we took samples from lake Erken and Plåten during summer and autumn for the international project FunAqua coordinated by a research group at the Estonian University of Life Science. FunAqua is a global inventory of fungal biodiversity in water and sediments based on DNA sequencing techniques. Fungi are well described key players in terrestrial ecosystems, whereas their diversity and importance in freshwater ecosystems in particular at the goal scale is still largely unknown. The project is also linked to GLEON, i.e. the Global lake observatory network, which is a perfect platform for a global standardized sampling campaign that bring together a larger number of research groups and samples from a large number of lakes and ponds. 

The new facility for handling wildlife was completed in September, and now also inspected and approved so ready to take in use. The facility enables great improvements for both data sampling (body measures, tissue samples etc) and other routines related to for example marked animals. The reconstruction started in January and a small inauguration ceremony takes place at October 11.

The building also contains a new kitchen for students and other guests, improved conditions in the car workshop and for storage at the second floor.
 

During the spring a new monitoring series was initiated at Grimsö, with wildlife cameras at 32 of the plots (in total 600) for the annual pellet counts (six species plus habitat data). Wildlife cameras are nowadays an important tool in wildlife management and research, and this project will for example evaluate the relationships between data obtained by pictures and traditional population data based on pellet counts.