Environmental monitoring
Another warm day in October and we have been out in the forest collecting mushrooms of different kinds; it’s a good year for mushrooms. The most unusual and good tasting today was the cauliflower mushroom. It’s one of the highlights, I think, strolling around in the forest looking for mushrooms. But you must be careful and only pick the ones you know. There are some pretty strong poisons in many of them.

Another organism is the moss. They collect all their nutrition from the rain and air, e.g. they don’t take their nutrition from the ground. Because of that they are excellent organisms to investigate for their content of heavy metals. In Karlstad we have checked the content of heavy metals in mosses since 1985 each and every 5: Th year. The trend is that the level of heavy metals in general, slowly decreases in the mosses. But there are some digression for some metals and locations.

To perform a long-termed environmental monitoring over the changes in the environment isn’t easy. The methods vary over the years and you have to be careful with documentation etc. Often the monitoring done at the local level are left out when the results are shown at regional or national level. I think the national environmental monitoring could develop more and combine the efforts made at the different levels of administration which is done poorly today.