Monitoring services: What you don’t see in the photos

Over the last few weeks, the team has been working across two very different field environments, a useful reminder of how much monitoring work can shift from one site to the next. 

If you follow us on LinkedIn, you may have seen a few recent posts from the HydroTerra Monitoring Services team. The photos usually look calm and controlled. The reality behind them tends to be a bit more involved. 

On land, the task was deep soil sampling using a Dormer Hand Auger Kit. Straightforward in theory, though depth, soil conditions and refusal points can all change how the day unfolds. A thumbs‑up photo followed, make of that what you will. 

Out on the water, the brief was more demanding: recovering soft sediment from the bottom of a pond, working from a boat, with the aim of keeping the sample as undisturbed as possible. Holding a floating vessel steady while sampling below is genuinely difficult, and getting it right takes careful planning. 

Working with Landair Surveys and Senior Surveyor Marcus Samuelsson, the team used survey control, a shore‑based rope system and high‑resolution bathymetric data to position the vessel and hold it in place. With the boat as steady as conditions allowed, Ture Carlson and Ruben Andersen recovered sediment cores using the Dormer UWS sampler. 

Field work of this kind depends on the right equipment, careful preparation and a team with the experience to adapt on site. 

The Dormer gear, for its part, did the job. 

Dormer Hand Auger Kit