Estimating Free Water Metabolism

A group of limnologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used a group of miniDOT loggers in order to estimate free water metabolism. They placed each miniDOT logger within a large glass bottle incubated in lake water to estimate free water metabolism while removing much of the physical noise. The bottles were filled with lake water from various depths and then suspended with a miniDOT at those depths for 48 hours. Using this method, they were able to tease out metalimnetic production and respiration in a location of the water column that had been dominated by internal waves when using a suspended sonde.
The miniDOT logger is a small, portable, completely submersible logging device able to record dissolved oxygen and temperature measurements.