The infrastructure at Röbäcksdalen has excellent conditions for teaching, research, and applied studies in crop production, soil science, climate studies, feeding of forages, and ecosystem studies in an agricultural environment.
The aim with SITES is to provide researchers with opportunities to use research stations in different ecosystems. The collaborating research stations are providing access to both facilities and data. SITES also hosts several monitoring programs. You can read more about this if you click on the link in the link collection below.
Röbäcksdalen represents a district in Umeå. Röbäcksslätten, which is the dominant part of Röbäcksdalen, is the largest continuous agricultural land area in northern Sweden. The urban location of the infrastructure may open up opportunities and thus invite to other research disciplines outside of natural science.
The entire infrastructure encompasses 300 hectares of fields and pastures. At the field research station about 40 field trials are conducted annually. The station also coordinates trials on three more field stations in northern Sweden with focus on crop science. At the research dairy facility there are 105 dairy cows available for doing trials focusing mainly on forage and sustainable food production. At the infrastructure it is possible to do research in a variety of areas such as animal science, agricultural science, ecology, phenology, climatology, geochemistry, biology, agroecology, soil science and environmental science. Visitors and users of the infrastructure can get access to the land and a stream collecting drainage and surface runoff-water from the area, animals in the dairy facility, workshop, machines, measuring equipment and technique, personnel, laboratories and working stations.
All data that is gathered within the infrastructure can also be made available for researchers. Most of the data is continuously collected data, data from feeding trials, climate/weather data, soil data, data from water samples of runoff-water, data from the catchment area around the station as well as GIS data and data from different long-term-trials.
Röbäcksdalen is part of two thematic programs within SITES; Spectral and Water. In SITES Spectral we continously collect spectral data from our fields using masts and drones equipped with spectral cameras. Within SITES Water we take water samples from the Degernäs creek that flows through our fields.