REFERENCE PERSON

Juha Karjalainen

WORKING TEAM

Heikki Hämäläinen, Pirjo Kuitunen, Kimmo Tolonen, Timo Marjomäki

The Department of Biological and Environmental Science of University of Jyväskylä offers high-quality teaching and is founded on excellent research activities. The Department is one of the largest at the JYU.

JYU is coordinating Päijänne LTER-site which is included in the EnvEurope project. In this LTER-site the research activities are concentrating on monitoring large lake ecosystem. Monitoring includes several levels (e.g. hydrology, water quality, phytoplankton, zooplankton, fisheries, macrophytes, zoobenthos) and thus providing support to the decision-making process. The Lake Päijänne case is an example of successful water protection policy. The lake system has been quite polluted due industry but has recovered. Despite of recovering it is still under several pressures and exploited in several ways. Monitoring has started in 1960’s.

In the present, the traditional monitoring is completed with automatically monitoring systems. The monitoring of the lake status is also essential for EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and further to develop methods and criteria’s involved in the directive. In Päijänne LTER-site JYU is in close co-operation with local environment and fisheries administrations and national Finnish Environment Institute and Fish and Game Research Institute, which partly guarantee high quality research.