2012-08-02
Successful Polar Research Project
The Lapporten valley seen from the Abisko Scientific Research Station. Photo: Sofia Bryntse, SLU
The major INTERACT project, wherein SLU contributes with research regarding Infrastructures for Environmental Monitoring in the Arctic, has been selected a Success Story by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme. The main motivation is the tremendous support obtained from stakeholder organisations at all scales, but also the innovative technologies used for establishing infrastructures for environmental communication throughout the far North.
The SLU scientist Tomas Thierfelder, associated professor in Environmetrics and Geoinformatics at the SLU Uppsala Department of Energy and Technology, is leading one of INTERACT’s three research projects. Dr. Thierfelders work-group develops web-based geographic decision-support systems that provide information on how research- and monitoring activities are distributed across the approximately 45 Polar stations that contribute to the project.
Supported by this information, individual stations may query “what everybody else is doing” (and have been doing), and base decisions regarding their own actions on the global network profile of activities. This type of information exchange is a fundamental prerequisite for a regulated environmental monitoring network across the Northern Polar region.
Polar region: A selection of INTERACT-stations. The picture is from the Interact web site.
Contact information
Associated Professor Tomas Thierfelder, SLU Uppsala.
Phone: + 46 (0)18-67 17 93, +46 (0)70-172 04 72, e-mail: Tomas.Thierfelder@slu.se
Written by:
Mikael Propst