SITES Water

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.

Busy September at Svartberget Research Station!

From 19th to 26th September, 30 PhD students from 7 countries arrive to Vindeln for the Watershed Ecology and Biogeochemistry course 2024. Over six intense days, students participated in presentations, poster discussions, and field visits, enhancing their understanding of key topics such as:

Hot off the press, the secretariat together with the team from Skogaryd Research Catchment just updated one of the core time series within the station´s SITES Water program. You can now access all water chemistry data through the end of 2022 coming from Skogaryd´s extensive monitoring in their sub-catchments (see overview map). 

Open access to the chemistry data from the streams and the lake Erssjön can be found here:  

As part of the SITES Water program at Abisko, lake monitoring in Stordalen is being established. Stordalen is a peatland catchment area with sporadic permafrost, which has been an important site for data collection since the 1950s.

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.

The spring flood at Svartberget Research Station has started and with it, water sampling in the Krycklan catchment is taking place 2 times a week. The snow is rapidly melting, with the lysimeters (see picture) measuring over 100 kg of flow over a 3-day period. 

At the same time, the field station is preparing for the summer forest field trial season with seasonal staff already starting in May and in total 12 extra persons working at the station by the beginning of June.  

After many years of measurements in Almbergasjön in Abisko, SITES Water is being moved to a lake in Stordalen.

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 ongoing work on estimating the discharge in the streams at Röbäcksdalens field station was initiated in the spring of 2023. At the time, the final phase of the snowmelt runoff was generating a peak stream flow. At Röbäcksdalen, a tracer is used to measure the discharge. The tracer is common table salt and it is injected (the mass balance method) into the stream, generating a dispersed cloud of conductivity change in the stream. The change in conductivity is then used to estimate the discharge.

This week SITES Water and SITES AquaNet field and lab techs met at Erken Laboratory for a joint workshop across the two Thematic Programs. The workshop focused on the current status and development of SITES Water and SITES AquaNet, along with sessions specific for the technical staff at the station. The sessions addressed life as field and lab tech, field and lab protocols, sensor calibrations, greenhouse sampling and hydrological measurements. The group also took a walk on ice-covered lake Erken for a hands on snow and ice measurement demonstration by the Erken staff.