SITES Thematic Programs are one form of collaboration, connecting individual stations in order to support and enhance research on both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems as well as offering open data from long-term monitoring and experimental installations.
The SITES AquaNet Thematic Program provides a standardized infrastructure to run mesocosm experiments in five lakes across SITES stations. In collaboration with the EU network, AQUACOSM-Plus, international project participants were supported through Transnational Access to run multi-station experiments in 2023. At Bolmen, Skogaryd and Erken, the lake mesocosm experiments were run in the spring and were focused on investigating the effects of different organic matter and nutrient fluctuation regimes on plankton communities across space (3 different lakes) and time (spring 2023 and summer 2022). Whereas the lake mesocom experiments at Asa and Svartberget were run in summer and focused on how different salinity disturbance regimes impact the function and composition of biological communities.
Stay tuned for results from these experiments over the course of 2024!
Photo: Blaize Denfeld
The SITES 2024 Calendar theme is “SITES Collaborations”. SITES aims to promote excellent ecosystem research and high-quality data that support this research. This includes collaborations that increase the number of projects that utilize multiple SITES stations and connect between aquatic and terrestrial processes. Further, SITES aims to strengthen the collaborations with relevant research infrastructures and networks across Sweden and internationally, including data infrastructures and services. Each month during 2024, follow along as we highlight a unique SITES collaboration.