On June 01-04, 2026, a PermaCOST workshop on ‘Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) Surveying on Permafrost’ was conducted at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. The workshop brought together 22 people from academia, national authorities and private companies from 10 countries (CH, CZ, DE, DK, FR, IT, NO, PT, RO, UK), together with a few local students.
The main objective of this workshop was to launch ERT-specific sub-group activities with respect to the aims of the PermaCOST working groups 2-4. During four days, we exchanged practices and experiences regarding ERT surveys in permafrost environments and associated data processing. We defined ERT-related objectives of the PermaCOST working groups, and we started the planning of further PermaCOST ERT training schools on field data acquisition and data processing to be organized in the next years.
We had data processing training lectures for state-of the art and open-source ERT processing software tools ‘ResIPy’ and ‘pyGIMLi’ and intense discussions about data quality issues and error assessment. An important part of the plenary sessions discussed how ERT data can contribute to the planned European-wide assessment of permafrost state and evolution, and more specifically, how to homogenize the available data sets and to achieve the necessary comparability.
The completion of the existing International Database on Geoelectrical Surveys on Permafrost (IDGSP) with all relevant data from Europe will be an important prerequisite for systematic homogenization and further analysis of the European data set. We also discussed about compiling temporal resistivity changes of all available repeated ERT surveys, validating European PF distribution maps through ERT, and writing guidelines for data acquisition and processing.
