News | 23 September 2026
IES Liljeholmen students turn satellite detectives to study water quality
How healthy is Lake Drevviken? To find out, students from IES Liljeholmen spent eight months acting as environmental detectives – using European Space Agency (ESA) satellite imagery and 14 years of water data to investigate pollution and algae levels in Stockholm’s local lake.
Their project, titled "Beneath the Surface", was part of the international ESA Climate Detectives initiative. Between September 2025 and April 2026, the young researchers studied key markers of water quality in Lake Drevviken: phosphorus levels, algae concentration (chlorophyll-a), and water clarity. ESA Climate Detectives is a European educational project run by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with national ESERO (European Space Education Resource Office) offices. Its goal is to engage students aged 8 to 19 in real-world environmental and climate research.
Working in specialised teams, the students from years 7 and 8 extracted live satellite imagery from ESA’s Sentinel satellites, analysed historical water records from 2010–2024, and created detailed graphs to trace how seasonal shifts affect the lake’s ecosystem over time.
"Watching students engage directly with real space imagery and environmental datasets was incredible," said Ms Rakimah D. Macabalang, Science and Technology teacher at IES Liljeholmen. "Instead of just reading about ecology in textbooks, they learned how to extract raw data, identify long-term environmental patterns, and write a professional scientific report."
In April 2026, the team's final investigation was officially published in the international ESA Climate Detectives project gallery, earning every participant an official certificate from the space agency.
"It was amazing to see how satellite photos from space could tell us what’s happening beneath the surface of a lake right near our school," shared a student in year 8. "Knowing our report is now published in the ESA gallery makes us really proud."