Röbäcksdalen

As leys (sown grasslands grown in rotation with annual grain crops) constitute upwards of 75% of arable land use in northern Sweden, they represent an important feature of the region’s landscape. SITES Röbäcksdalen is situated within Röbäcksslätten, the largest continuous agricultural land area in northern Sweden. Röbäcksdalen’s research infrastructure includes over 280 hectares of agricultural land, most of which is conventionally managed by the research barn to provide feed for its dairy cows.

A heavy rainstorm, exceeding 91 millimeters of precipitation over just a few days, caused flooding of the SITES Water infrastructure at Röbäcksdalen near Umeå. After four days of rain, the storm surge from Degernäsbäcken and Röbäcken carved new routes across normally dry land.

The flooding damage at Röbäcksdalen was limited to two specific locations, site 1 and site 6: at site 1, the flooding caused temporary data loss from sensors; at site 6, one ring of a concrete water pipe tipped over, requiring work to retrieve it from the bottom of Röbäcken.

SITES Röbäcksdalen Station Manager, Brooke Micke, and researchers from the Department of Soil and Environment at SLU, Lisbet Norberg and Maria Blomberg, recently finished a project funded by SLU’s fortlöpande miljöanalys program.

SITES enables researchers to enhance field-based ecosystem research by supporting a network of field stations across Sweden. SITES offers expert technical competence at the stations for helping plan and implement research projects and provides open access to local monitoring and remote sensing data as well as contextual information about the surrounding ecosystems. Taken together, SITES provides a rich context for setting up field sampling and experiments at one or multiple stations across Sweden.