News archive

A restoration case study called “Beaver re-introduction” is the Swedish contribution to the new EU Green Deal project MERLIN*. The case study will have a before-after design, which means experimental construction as well as removal of 60 beaver dams in Sweden, of which 10 will be located in the Vindeln Catchment including Krycklan (Svartberget Research Station). It is a four-year project and aims to sample two years before the measures (dam construction/removal) and two years of sampling after the measures.

Ongoing work by SITES spectral uses satellites to give researchers a broad spatial view of vegetation conditions at SITES stations. This work generates data layers describing vegetation productivity and phenology for 20 x 20 km areas. Layer data ready for inclusion in GIS databases will be distributed in analysis-ready format, in the Swedish reference system. The data show the seasonal development of green vegetation and can be useful for monitoring vegetation’s response to variations in weather, human influence, and other factors.

In 2018 researchers from Sweden and Germany used the SITES AquaNET mesocosm infrastructure to participate in a global mesocosm experiment on salinization led by scientists from the University of Toledo in the US and Queen's University in Canada. The overall aim of the project was to study how the increasing salt concentration in lakes observed in many parts of the world resulting from human activities (e.g. road deicing, mining, agriculture) and increasing droughts and water scarcity affect life in freshwater ecosystems.

SITES Lönnstorp will start the process of converting 10 ha of farmland to an organic experimental field this year. SITES Lönnstorp will manage this field and we hope that it will be available for organic experiments as soon as next year. The field will be visible from the road leading to Campus Alnarp (see map below) and we think that the location close to campus will help to attract interesting experiments. We expect that this visible location will also help to promote the facilities and infrastructure to students, researchers, companies, and the wider public.   

Are you interested in leading and further developing Sweden’s national infrastructure for ecosystem research?

Lifeplan is a global research effort aimed at mapping biodiversity around the planet in a systematic way. It will run for six years and involves more than 100 locations around the globe. Five different kinds of data are collected; soil, spores, insects, audio for bird and bat recognition, and camera images. Here at Asa Research Station we have had equipment up and running for nearly a year now and it is working well. The research area is a one-hectare square plot with natural vegetation (forest).

Röbäcksdalen research station is a bit different from the other SITES stations. It is a managed ecosystem that produces biomass, which feeds the animals on the station’s farm. The farm has a crop rotation that is typical for northern Sweden, with leys of grass and clover, barley, pasture, and some additional pea/oat mixtures and fallow fields. The annual output from this ecosystem varies with many things including; winter survival of perennial crops, temperature and rainfall during the vegetation season, and much more.

On a global scale, forests currently act as a sink for atmospheric CO2. Forest management plays a large role in determining the CO2 uptake and long-term carbon storage in forests. Managed forests usually have lower ecosystem carbon stocks compared to pristine or old-growth forests, hence there is great potential to increase active terrestrial carbon sequestration if forests are managed appropriately. There is an ongoing debate over which forest management system provides the greatest long-term climate benefits.

In midwinter, when fewer field surveys are running, SITES´ data collection continues indoors. One project is to go through tick (Ixodes) material from last summer and the physical samples from marked animals.After collection in the field, samples are stored in Cryo freezers (-80°C), until they can be analyzed. Tick occurrence and frequency in different habitats are estimated using a specific survey method (“flagging”), but ticks are also collected from wild animals that are handled, e.g. voles (Microtus spp.) and roe deer (Capreolus capreolus). 

The SITES Secretariat wishes our community, friends and associates a good start in the New Year. We hope that despite the ongoing pandemic a way back to a normal life with regular activities like in-person meetings, workshops and travel will be possible this year. There are many exciting things to look forward to in 2022, not least the transition into a new funding phase.
We wish you endurance for the probably still tough weeks ahead and stay healthy!