How might we prevent vandalism at Sauce Grande Shallow Lake (Argentina)?

PERILLO, V.L.; VITALE, A.J.; FORNERON, C.F.; PICCOLO, M.C.; PERILLO, G.M.E.

Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire

Conferencia; GLEON 13; 2011

Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)

On February 17, 2011 an autonomous buoy fully designed and built at IADO was moored at the Sauce Grande shallow lake, Argentina. This is the first buoy ever moored in an Argentinean lake to register long-term data on meteorological and water parameters at 5 min interval. Data is sent to the IADO server every 30 min and updated on a web page http://emac.criba.edu.ar.On March 23, 2011 (1055 h) connection with the buoy was lost. The buoy was damaged by unknown people and some of the cables and the datalogger were affected. We retrieved it and also installed newly developed sensors and moored it again on April 14th (0825 h). It operated flawless until August 22th (1400 h). On September 20th we confirmed that again a vandalic action basically destroyed the whole buoy. In both cases, the individuals did not take out any of the sensors or cables, but directly destroyed all the outer sensors and the conductivity one.At present time we are repairing the buoy, but the problem that arises from this is the effect that these disturbances may have on the time series analysis. Repairs will take 4 weeks, resulting in the lost of data during the first month of spring that could be related to the biogeochemical processes and biological activity. As vandalism is common in many places worldwide, we propose the creation of a special GLOEN task committee to look to this problem.