Mitigation of browning of lake waters

Browning of surface water, rivers and lakes is a major problem that affects the ecosystem and the water quality.

For example, increasing browning reduces biodiversity in lakes by diminishing the fish population, it lowers the recreational value in tourism and requires higher effort to produce clean drinking water. Due to its complexity and the relatively young research field the governing processes are not fully understood yet.

But to mitigate the effect of browning, these processes need to be understood and suitable measures needs to be taken.In our project we want to create the conditions for developing a toolbox of mitigation and verification methods that have been tested and verified to be efficient for reducing the browning of lakes.

We expect these measures to be transferrable to many other lake systems since the problem is widespread in Sweden as wells as in other countries.We plan to involve all problem owners and stakeholder in the Lagan Water region and conduct the testing of different measures around Lake Bolmen.

Our aim is to establish a good communication channel between the involved actors via workshops and to identify different surface and underground conditions on a large scale with the help of geophysics in combination with other sensors and in-situ investigations.

The monitoring of the browning mitigation will be carried out in test areas to evaluate their impact, and to identify and delineate areas that require different mitigations strategies.