News
20 May 2021
We were saddened to learn recently of the death in January this year of Prof. Bill Heal. Bill was instrumental in setting up the UK's Environmental Change Network, securing substantial funding from the Natural Environment Research Council for both ECN and the TIGER programme.
Bill did his PhD on protozoa at Moor House NNR (an ECN site) and went on to coordinate the International Biological Programme (IBP) research there in the 1960s and '70s. He was an advocate of multidisciplinary research,...
13 May 2021
Over 150 people from both consortia of the eLTER PPP and eLTER PLUS projects took part in 25 sessions with the audience for each of them varying between +30 to >150. Naturally, due to the high number of participants and sessions, this presented a significant organizational and logistical challenge which was successfully overcome with the joint efforts of both organisers and participants.The meeting started with high-profile guest speakers valorizing the framework where an international resear...
23 April 2021
A data paper has been published in Earth System Science Data journal describing how the eLTER Information System infrastructure has been expanded by a climate service data product, providing open access to pre-processed regional climate change scenario data from a state-of-the-art regional climate model ensemble of EURO-CORDEX.The paper demonstrates a number of the strengths of eLTER including its extensive site network, Information System and ability to publish European-scale data products.The...
21 April 2021
The first eLTER call for Transnational and Remote Access (TA-RA) proposals to be organised under the present eLTER PLUS project gathered 20 applications.
The projects are currently being run through a plausibility check and scientific evaluation. For the details and the sequence of the TA-RA related processes, see the reference document on the TA-RA Scheme.
Reviews are conducted by peers from the eLTER community. The outcome of the evaluation process will be announced soon. Successful...
8 April 2021
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting 2020 was held between 1-17 December as an entirely virtual event.
As 1 of 6 partners in the Global Ecosystem Research Initiative (GERI) eLTER presented GERI achievements and plans in a session on “Global Environmental Measurement and Monitoring Technologies: Current Capabilities and Future Needs”.
One of the highlights reported by Michael Mirtl was the completion of the GERI Memorandum of Cooperation signing process by December 2020.In...
6 April 2021
The eLTER France community shares the news of receiving 9.6 million euros in the span of the next 8 years for research under the infrastructure project TERRA FORMA. The project’s objective is to design and test smart observatories of socio-ecological systems in the Anthropocene (geological age starting roughly in the mid. 20th century onward, debates are still ongoing on the exact time it encompasses).
Led by CNRS, TERRA FORMA aims at developing a new kind of observatory of the critical zone...
2 April 2021
We are continuing to develop an eLTER cookie-cutting tool, designed to make it easy to explore and collateharmonised datasets for a spatial unit like an eLTER site. Extracting data that are relevant for a site now takes a minute instead of potentially hours. This is one of the first steps towards establishing “information clusters” for each site benefiting from multiple data sources beyond data gathered at the site.The prototype eLTER cookie-cutting tool is being tested after it was demons...
1 April 2021
The eLTER whole system approach is utilizing the broad variety of biodiversity, environmental and socio-ecological data monitored at eLTER sites.Recently, a new study has been published in the journal Science of the Total Environment titled “Recovery from air pollution and subsequent acidification masks the effects of climate change on a freshwater macroinvertebrate community”.Using 32 years of detailed freshwater macroinvertebrate and environmental data collected from the eLTER site Bavarian Fo...
30 January 2021
13th of January 2021 marked an important day for the Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research (eLTER) as it held its first ever Sites and Platforms Forum (SPF) in a virtual setting.
Around 240 participants from 26 countries representing about 200 sites and platforms took part in the event which had one major objective – to give voice to the group of most important internal stakeholders in the eLTER initiative, the Site and Platform Coordinators (SPC...
6 January 2021
The eLTER IC is the decisive body to discuss and approve strategic issues of the emerging eLTER Research Infrastructure (RI) planning and implementation such as legal, governance, financial and operational matters. Therefore, an pro-active IC with delegations from as many countries as possible marks a major milestone in the eLTER Preparatory Phase Project (PPP) and in the entire eLTER ESFRI process. The meeting was prepared in numerous steps since February 2020 with the National Coordinators in...