Research

Limnology is the science of inland water ecosystems, including communities and populations, and biogeochemical processes; and microorganisms as well as larger organisms are studied. The research addresses issues relevant for aquatic ecosystems, but also of general significance in ecology and evolution. The objectives of our research include fundamental scientific questions as well as topics of concern for the protection and management of the environment.

The department harbors three major research groups, but also considerable synergy and cooperation between these groups:

• Aquatic Communities and Populations
• Microbial Ecology
• Biogeochemistry

Our field station at Lake Erken, the Erken Laboratory, has since its foundation in the 1940s served both as a research station and as a study and course centre. The Erken laboratory is running and mainatining one of the longest lake monitoring time series in the world. Today, Lake Erken is one of the most instumented lakes in the world. Therefore, Lake Erken is very important to studies of how climate change impacts lake ecosystems. Lake Erken is part of SITES, the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science, as well as of GLEON, the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network. The Erken laboratory also hosts an open infrastructure for mesocosm experiments with high-frequency sensors, SITES AquaNet.