Fondazione Edmund Mach

The study and monitoring activities of the Institute on Lake Tovel began in the 1970s with the installation of the hydrometereological station on the lake equipped with instruments to provide data on air temperature, pressure, humidity, rainfall, snowfall, wind strength and direction as well as duration of wind and breeze, solar radiation and water temperature.

In those years, the Institute began an in-depth and long-term survey in order to obtain all the environmental data possible to help characterise all aspects of the conditions under which the phenomenon of redness might reoccur.

In 1972 Alvise Vittori started a series of hydrobiological analysis on Tovel, from which, the presence of non-biodegradable detergents in silt on the lake bottom was found. In order to resolve this issue, the construction of a sewer was required, whilst the protectionists (reference Italia Nostra) believed that the intervention should have been more radical and should consider the demolition of houses, for the elimination of both direct and indirect sources of pollution.

In the same year Professor Elio Corona carried out a dendrochronological research on tree trunks of arboreal species on the shores of the lake (white fir, spruce, Scots pine, mountain pine, larch, beech, maple and yew tree) from which data concerning the increase of the environmental humidity which occurred from the month of May to September emerged. A few years later he repeated the same survey using trees from the access valley to the lake, obtaining the same results.

In 1977 the first hydrobiological and climatological data collected by the Agricultural and Forestry Experimental Station of San Michele all’Adige were published. The activities of the Institute, in particular those dedicated to the study of Lake Tovel, are well documented in the book series “Esperienze e Ricerche”.

All the volumes of the magazine present on the website Esperienze e Ricerche (immanens.com)of the Mach Foundation have been analyzed, from the first volume dated 1929-30 to the twentieth one, dated 1990-1991.

The following covers the main articles from the book series “Esperienze e Ricerche” related to the studies on the lake.

In the following years several hypothesis were put forward in order to explain the disappearance of the phenomenon of redness of the waters – once attributed to the alga ‘Glenodinium sanguineum Marchesoni’, which regularly occurred, during the hottest days of the summer from about the mid-1800s until 1964. All the hypothesis, however converged on human activities. Agriculture and related activities were also believed to be responsible for the alteration of the ecosystem that until then was considered to be unique in the world.

It was thus that in March 2000, on the occasion of the second conference of the “Representatives of the Scientific Institutions of Research” held in Villa Tambosi in Trento, the Istituto Agrario di San Michele all’Adige was asked by the President of the Provincial Council to take charge of the complex issue, in order to provide a scientific explanation to the phenomenon and possibly give a definitive answer to the causes of the disappearance of the phenomenon of redness of the lake.

Thus the project “SALTO – Study on the disappearance of the phenomenon of redness of Lake Tovel” was born. The Agricultural Institute was entrusted with the task of coordinating a specific research team. Twenty different institutions and diverse authorities participated, six of which were international (Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland).

The SALTO research project achieved remarkable scientific results and it provided an occasion, for leading experts and scholars of specific environmental sectors, to meet and discuss together. Finally, the group gave an explanation about the phenomenon of redness and especially why it has not recurred.

It is important to note how the researchers of the Istituto Agrario di San Michele all’Adige, the body that has invested most in this project, acheived a precise identification of the alga, refocusing the problem of reddening into the context of a proper scientific investigation.

A framework of knowledge has thus been established and it has finally clarified the close correlation between the way in which animals are managed in the mountain pasture and the appearance of algal blooms, instead, for decades, the attention had been mainly directed towards the algae that were not responsible for the redness phenomenon (please compare 1-Studio_sul_mancato_arrossamento_del_Lago-pdf).