planetwater

ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

Experimental Lake Area

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Some years ago, I helped a fellow student doing fieldwork for a day at the Experimental Lake Area (ELA) in northwestern Ontario.

It was a beautiful winter day, we used snowshoes to get to some weirs to get our samples. I remember that I was amazed that those weirs were heated so they would not freeze. I was also amazed about the big sampling network in a relevant real world setting.

In short, the ELA is a set of lakes that are heavily instrumented in various kinds of the water cycle. Hence, the area is quite large. The video below explains that there were some funding issues in the recent past, which seem to be resolved now. The video gives an overview, what the ELA is.

There is an interesting quote in the video that relates about the relevance of real world field work and resulting data: “the results from the whole ecosystem experiment typically were very different from what you would have predicted from small scale experiments”.

Written by Claus

September 11th, 2013 at 6:23 pm

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