Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science (SITES)

SITES (Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science) 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 available. The core of SITES consists of nine field research stations that represent a variety of Swedish climate zones and ecosystems, including agricultural land, forests, wetlands, lakes and streams and alpine, glacial landscapes. The purpose of SITES is to offer researchers well-functioning infrastructures for field research. SITES also runs several long-term data collection programs that provide researchers with contextual data. SITES is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), 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. SLU is accomplished by the principals University of Gothenburg, Uppsala University, Stockholm University and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat. In addition, Lund University is partner of one of the long-term monitoring campaigns. 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. A multitude of long-term data collection programs is conducted within SITES. Data collected within SITES are freely available on the SITES Data Portal (https://data.fieldsites.se/portal/ - web link) and can be used by anyone as long as the data is cited and acknowledged, following the instructions in the SITES data policy (https://data.fieldsites.se/licence - web link). The SITES data portal contains quality-controlled data available for download, from all SITES stations and long-term monitoring programs. New datasets are continuously being uploaded. Data that is still not published on the SITES Data Portal can be requested by contacting SITES (data@fieldsites.se).