LIST Water Lecture on critical zone Sciences - Dr Paul FLOURY

Extralab, a new way of laboratory management in real time and in network: strengths, weaknesses and next challenges.

Extralab is a French start-up that offers a new concept for a full remote decentralized laboratory solution. This company is born after 5 years of pregnancy in CNRS through Critex scientific program in collaboration between 3 French institutes (IPGP, INRAE, University of Strasbourg). Launched in 2014, Critex aims at developping innovative instruments to explore and monitor the Critical Zone, and especially dedicated to water quality in rivers, aquifers and lakes through a lab-field concept, called “Riverlab”. The project was funded with € 1.4 million to develop a network of three Riverlab prototypes in contrasted environmental conditions (agriculture/forest, plain/mountain), which allow to perform high-frequency and direct measurements regardless the quality of collected water.
During my presentation, I will present the development and management of such a lab-field solution by answering the following questions: How can we manage and work on a full remote laboratory? From field missions to data treatment in scientific models, how have we built this collaborative network? What can we learn thanks to high-frequency continuous measurements? How the collaborative teams were organized around the Riverlab development? What improvements this represents to share experience on the quality and on the performance of the acquisition?
New insights and new opportunities for the water journey in the Critical Zone will be illustrated within two complementary explorational studies: stream solute export at event scale in the agricultural Orgeval Critical Zone Observatory and control of the diurnal variations on the elemental concentration variability in streams.

Dr Paul FLOURY

Extralab society