Making the most out of synoptic sampling campaigns and large datasets: development of new statistical tools to optimize evaluation of environmental change (UNSUM)

Background

Sweden has extensive, long-term and high quality monitoring programs to monitor the state of the environment. These programs have been ongoing for decades and produce large amounts of data that are publicly available in online databases. Unfortunately, the development of appropriate statistical methods has not received the same focus and many of the scientific evaluations of temporal trends in data rely on statistical trend methods that are 40 years old and developed for single sites and short monitoring periods, resulting in a substantial loss of information carried by monitoring.

Aim

The main focus of this project is to

• develop standardized and sound practices to evaluate spatially varying trends in monitoring programs with high spatial and low temporal resolution, using the Swedish Lake Survey as basis. 
• use these methods to identify regionally differentiated trends of brownification and oligotrophication of Swedish lakes and
•  to discriminate between large-scale and local scale drivers of brownification and oligotrophication.