SITES is a national infrastructure for terrestrial and limnological field research. SITES aims to promote high-quality research through long-term field measurements and field experiments, and by making data from these activities openly available.
At the core of SITES is a set of active and well equipped research stations representing a variety of climatic zones and ecosystems across Sweden, including agricultural land, forests, wetlands, mountains, lakes and streams. SITES offers researchers well-functioning infrastructures for field research and runs several long-term data collection programs that provide researchers with contextual data on terrestrial ecosystems and inland waters. Data collected within SITES is freely available on the SITES Data Portal and can be used openly as long as the data is cited and acknowledged according to SITES data policy.
SITES is funded by the Swedish Research Council, together with the principals of the research stations. The coordinator of SITES is the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), where also the secretariat is located. The collaboration is regulated by a consortium agreement between the principals. SITES is governed by an independent steering group and the daily work is led by a scientifically well merited director.
SITES provides the following to the research community:
- Open access to long term data series on key ecosystem variables
- Access to long-term and large-scale ecosystem manipulation experiments beyond what is tractable for individual researchers or projects
- Qualified technical and practical support for users of the infrastructure
- Protocols, best practices and a Data Portal for ecosystem research
- A forum and platform for integrative ecosystem science community building
- Access to international networks and infrastructures and an efficient outreach strategy
Contact person:
Blaize Denfeld
blaize.denfeld@slu.se