Looking back into the future
Prenart Super Quartz soil water sampler – forever lasting?
Since 1988, when the Danish government adopted the Aquatic Environment Plan 1, one of the longest running monitoring programs of nitrate leaching from agricultural land has been in operation.
As a part of the programme 40 stations measuring at 1 meter depth, were equipped each with 10 Prenart SuperQuartz soil water samplers.
This was the very first project where Prenart soil water samplers were used in larger scale and now 30 years later thirty-one of the stations are still in operation.
The measurements have shown that the nitrogen concentrations below the root zone have decreased by 0.34 and 0.65 mg N / l per year from 1990/91 to 2014/15 on clayey and sandy soil, respectively. This is a reduction of approximately 40 % over the 25 years with monitoring. .
Afforestation to protect groundwater – a new long-term monitoring project
In cooperating with Copenhagen University and Aalborg Vand A/S, Prenart Equipment has just finished another large-scale instrumentation with 48 Prenart SuperQuartz soil water samplers distributed in different treatments over an area of 20 hectares.
The area was previously intensively used for agricultural production, but is now afforested to protect a drinking water reservoir from diffuse pollution.
The soil water samplers are placed below the main root zone at 1 m depth with the purpose to monitor the reduction in nitrate leaching to groundwater over the next 30-50 years.
Different treatments are established to compare afforestation methods and in the longer term to investigate tree species differences in nitrate leaching.