Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network Attracts More Countries, Students, Sites
By Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu
GLEON’s Newest Instrumented Buoy Deployed on Florida Lake
San Diego, CA, March 19, 2008 -- More than 70 experts converged on Lake Placid, Florida, in late February for a meeting of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON). The lake researchers, ecologists, environmental engineers and information-technology experts came from 17 countries in Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America - many for the first time.
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The grass-roots group is building a scalable, persistent network of lake ecology observatories to collect, share and collaborate over a growing flood of real-time data from lakes around the world. At present, the GLEON web portal showcases streaming data from nine lakes in four countries, with new sites added monthly.
"Many of the environmental threats that face lakes are not local, they are international in scope," says GLEON Steering Committee chair Timothy Kratz, who runs the Trout Lake Station of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The spread of invasive species is a global issue that is manifested locally, as are the effects of climate change on our resources, and the way that changes in land use affect resources. So in order to have a full understanding of each of these issues and how lakes respond, one needs to have a complete set of types of lakes, locations of lakes, cultures in which lakes are located - and that's something that only an international network can do."
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"GLEON is a grassroots network of people who are interested in advancing ecology using technology," says Paul Hanson, a UW-Madison researcher who is principal investigator on the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network grant that funds GLEON efforts to build a community of researchers. "By having and developing a grassroots network, we empower individuals who participate in GLEON to decide on the future of the network, the policies we develop, the actions we take, and the science questions we address."
UC San Diego researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) are playing a critical role in designing the communications and information-technology infrastructure - cyberinfrastructure, for short - that links lake observing systems to each other through a publicly available web portal."Cyberinfrastructure is important for the GLEON network and other environmental observing systems because it is the medium by which you collect data, share data and collaborate," says SDSC's Tony Fountain, principal investigator on the NSF DataTurbine project, which has created an open-source version of commercial technology to handle streaming data from environmental sensors, and made the technology available to all GLEON members. "Without these automated tools, it is not possible to do modern environmental science. The time when you could conduct your field research with a pen and pencil is long past."
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Through PRAGMA, Lin was introduced to University of Wisconsin limnologist Tim Kratz, who visited Taiwan. Within eight months, they had a functioning buoy on Yuan Yang Lake, a small mountain lake in Taiwan. "So we thought, gee, we did this for two lakes: what's to stop us from doing this globally?" recalls Kratz. "Right now it is possible to go to a single website and access data from nine different lakes in four different places around the world, and we're adding to that monthly. Not only are all these data available to researchers, but they're also available to the general public."
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During the GLEON 6 meeting at the Archbold Biological Field Station in Florida, researchers deployed an instrumented buoy on nearby Lake Annie, one of the most studied lakes in Florida. Limnological surveys of the lake, taking measurements of physical, chemical and biological conditions, have been carried out every month since 1983, and Archbold Biological Station director Hilary Swain says the new non-stop data from the lake buoy will offer new insight into lake processes.
"What we had in the past was as if we lived our life and we had our eyes open only one day every month of the year," says Swain. "You can imagine how much you'd miss if you only had your eyes open one day a month every year. That was the amount of data we were collecting. Now we are going to have our eyes open 24/7/365, and that will revolutionize what we understand about the lake."
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Florida International University professor Evelyn Gaiser oversaw deployment of the buoy on Lake Annie. "We were able to know it was actually transmitting because we called from the lake to the station to find the data were already streaming in," said Gaiser. "Our readings will be coming in every 15 minutes of the same kind of things that we monitor in our monthly program, but at a temporal frequency that will allow us to address a much broader set of questions, not only for our lake, but in this larger network of lakes."
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Instrumented buoys and other cyberinfrastructure are allowing lake researchers to cover a vast amount of space, and integrate time measurements at intervals that were not possible until now. "So now you're able to ask different types of questions," adds UCSD's Arzberger. "You can begin to think of lake systems in the face of larger planetary systems: What role do they play when we talk about the circulation of carbon in the atmosphere? What role do they play more broadly, rather than just the single lake?"
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Most lake researchers appear convinced that understanding lakes will require deployment of sensors and automated monitoring equipment, and comparing the data across types of lakes and geographies. According to Ami Nishri of the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute, sensors deployed in the Sea of Galilee have left no doubt about the value of non-stop data. "We know the power of it," says Nishri. "We are having the data transmitted to the lab, and you come to work in the morning and you know what happened in the lake overnight."
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New Zealand's David Hamilton is overseeing the deployment of sensors in that country's Rotorua Lakes region. "For me it was a very logical step to start to instrument these lakes with buoys," explains Hamilton, who holds the Chair in Lakes Management and Restoration at the University of Waikato. The chair was funded by a regional environmental organization, Environment Bay of Plenty, to pursue research on water resources. "If you didn't go out for two or three days and missed an event of very low oxygen concentrations that potentially killed all of the aerobic organisms within the lake, then you might miss the whole change in the ecology of the system."
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Getting better data to feed into computer models that simulate ecological processes is an important driver for scientists joining GLEON. "Modeling in a network is a key tool," says David da Motta Marques of Brazil's Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. "It's a good tool to foresee the future and drive new questions, because you don't need to go into the field. Your questions can be answered very fast and can give you new insights."
During the Florida meeting, GLEON working groups discussed areas of future cooperation. "We are at the stage now where there is enough critical mass in a few areas," believes UCSD's Arzberger. "One is modeling, another is microbial ecology, and another is understanding the role of episodic events on lakes."
Comparing lake data across national boundaries offers researchers new avenues for understanding phenomena on the primary lakes they study. "It's hard to find good replicates of lakes because you're stuck with whatever you have in your location," says Trina McMahon, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Wisconsin has a lot of beautiful lakes but sometimes we need a lake that is different enough in some kind of way that we can't find in Wisconsin, or we prefer it to be at a different latitude or a different elevation. We can do more controlled comparisons that way."
Case in point: New Hampshire's Lake Sunapee, one of the first member sites in GLEON, which recently began showing evidence of cyanobacterial (or blue-green algae) blooms..
"There were no previous data about this bloom, so we began researching it just about the time it showed up," recalls Kathleen Weathers, a researcher at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. "But no monitoring data were available that would allow us to track this bloom over time." Weathers - who spent childhood summers at Lake Sunapee - began researching the problem on a sabbatical to work with the Lake Sunapee Protective Association, whose private members were among the first to discover the problem.
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Weathers also thinks that membership in GLEON will allow Lake Sunapee's citizen scientists to share their model with other communities around the world. "There is tremendous potential for buoy data to be a common language not only for scientists, but also for people interested in their lakes and water resources," says Weathers.
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GLEON also allows scientists to tackle fundamental issues of the weather's impact on the environment. "In most of our lakes, there is no ice cover at all, or a much earlier ice cover," says Uppsala University professor Thorsten Blenckner. "We see changes in Sweden, in Norway, in Finland and Estonia and all over Europe. So the question now is: does it matter? In GLEON, we hope to be able to answer the question." The German-born scientist recently received European funding to expand the number of sensors and automated buoys on Swedish lakes, and to compare data across Scandinavian sites through GLEON.
At the GLEON meeting in Florida, and at the prior half-yearly meeting in Finland, there was a push to get more graduate students involved, and to fuel collaborations among students from different backgrounds. "For the first time we have a substantial number of information-technology students and aquatic ecology graduate students, who don't normally interface at their home institutions," says Cornell's Cayelan Carey, who leads the graduate-student contingent within GLEON. "By coming together we are trying to develop a vocabulary for the two to interact and share data."
Graduate students held their own sessions in Florida to identify topics of special interest to them - everything from 'buoys for dummies' to a statistics course on how to deal with huge sets of time-series data.
"As we go on over the next 20 years - which will be critical for our environment - having students be able to understand and see data from these types of lakes will be very transformational," predicts UCSD's Arzberger. "They will become part of the longer-term process of maintaining and improving the environment, and this is where education is so important."
"These larger-scale networking kinds of science are going to be a significant way in which science is done in the future," says Barbara Benson, of UW-Madison's Center for Limnology. "I think GLEON is trying to be very creative and aware about training students to be able to step into leadership roles in the future in terms of these larger networks."
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As more buoys are deployed on more lakes around the world and more data are shared over the GLEON network, the cyberinfrastructure will give researchers the chance to collaborate in new ways. But eventually, the value of these new high-tech tools depends on the answer to one question. "Are we going to be able to do new science?" asks GLEON Steering Committee member Arzberger. "Ultimately, that is the bottom line. That is the metric by which we'll declare ourselves successful and prove, or not, this notion that cyberinfrastructure is about community building and new science."
Related Links
GLEON
Archbold Biological Station