Limnotek maintains an inventory of advanced equipment and instrumentation for limnological surveys. The inventory includes many common and commercially available items for standard sampling and data logging but we also customize instruments, devices, and procedures for unique applications as follows:
· deep lake and reservoir CTD profiling with high resolution oceanographic sensors and rigging,
· long term deployment instruments and other field instruments for detailed pH monitoring in low conductivity waters,
· High accuracy water filtration systems for chemical partitioning of water samples,
· Meteorological instruments and data loggers for lake and reservoir mixing studies,
· Temperature moorings for long term mixing studies,
· Customized boat for hydro-acoustics surveys, heavy net trawling, gillnetting, and fish sample processing,
· High resolution sensors and data loggers for temperature and turbidity monitoring,
· Small and large benthic grabs for sediment and benthos sampling in lakes, reservoirs, and large rivers.
· Air borne techniques for sampling water from lakes over large geographic areas in short time periods
Some of our gear is designed and built from scratch because it is not commercially available. We developed and successfully used a high accuracy turbidity monitoring platform with sensor wipers for use in deep fast flowing rivers. We also designed and used a periphyton and benthic invertebrate sampler for the same conditions. This design and the associated sampling methodology is now the standard required for use by other companies and organizations in long term monitoring of large rivers for BC Hydro, the largest power utility in British Columbia, including the SiteC clean energy project. Another sampler was designed and has been successfully used for more than 20 years for in situ measurement of algal accrual in small rivers. Still another periphyton sampler was developed for high resolution measurements of periphyton accrual, temperature, light, and nutrient concentrations simultaneously with exclusion of grazing by invertebrates over multiple water depths in lakes and reservoirs. Another innovation was development of a device that samples plankton and records water velocity, continuously oscillating over the whole depth profile of large rivers during deployment. These innovations have contributed greatly to high accuracy data for development of simulation and statistical models.