After a year of collaboration, Fairscope and Sailowtech are continuing their adventure! Sailowtech, a Swiss student association, develops low-tech scientific instruments, and promotes citizen science, in the fields of limnology and oceanography, testing these tools onboard sailboats.
After borrowing a PlanktoScope from Fairscope, Sailowtech has now joined the PlanktoScope family, primarily to study plankton in Swiss lakes near their university, the EPFL in Lausanne.
A Meticulous Protocol
Since its creation, plankton has always been a central focus for Sailowtech’s students. In autumn 2024, as the association set out to design a research project dedicated to studying plankton in Lake Geneva, a partnership with FairScope was established.
FairScope provided Sailowtech with a PlanktoScope kit on loan, allowing the students to begin their investigations.
In collaboration with scientists and labs from EPFL and UNIL, Sailowtech investigated how plankton populations vary across different areas of Lake Geneva. Their research focused on differences in species composition and abundance depending locations, seasons and time of the day — with samples also collected during nightime.
Using a dedicated net and a sailboat, students collected a variety of samples. Some of them also worked on plankton identification using machine learning, a task that appears to be more challenging for freshwater plankton than for marine species. Most plankton research focuses indeed on marine environments, resulting in a limited datasets for freshwater organisms.
Therefore, Sailowtech also collaborates closely with Ecotaxa (https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr), a platform dedicated to expanding plankton research, by classifying plankton across diverse environments through collaborative research.
Outreach with the PlanktoScope
Outside the use on the lake for sampling, the PlanktoScope was also exhibited at various events.
The Low-Tech Camp, was an event organized by Sailowtech in May 2025, bringing togehter more than 300 participants for conferences and round tables, on the role of low-tech in today’s world. A dedicated booth allowed visitors to see the PlanktoScope, where people could learn how to use the tool and observe real samples.
Sailowtech is also committed to outreach for the younger public, organizing educational activities in schools to introduce plankton science to audiences ranging from primary school children to high school students.
Future Projects
In spring 2025, Sailowtech bought a new version (V2.6) of the PlanktoScope kit from Fairscope, to continue its research, and assembled it. Thanks to its resolution and software, taking images of plankton up to 200 µm has never been so easy!
The segmenter helps to isolate each plankton in a picture. This isolation of plankton is used for identification afterwards!
Students are planning new expeditions to refine their protocol and study the vertical distribution of plankton in lakes, rather than the horizontal distribution that has been studied until now. The net will be lowered to different depths, and the collected samples will reveal how species composition changes with different physico-chemical conditions in the vertical water column.
Thanks to the PlanktoScope, students can easily contribute to the database of freshwater plankton.
For many students, it was the first time they had seen plankton, and they were amazed. About 30 samples have been taken so far, but they are not going to stop yet.