News
18 July 2022
Is there life on Jupiter's moon Europa? An ocean suspected to be under miles of ice gives science hope. But how might it be reached and explored? In March, a six-person research group from the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) spent two weeks at Abisko Scientific Research Station.Their goal was to test an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) beneath the ice of lake Torneträsk. The researchers are working on developing a robot that can indep...
18 July 2022
BioDT (Biodiversity Digital Twin for Advanced Modelling, Simulation andPrediction Capabilities) is a recently started HE project in which eLTER is closely involved.BioDT aims to enhance the predictive understanding of biodiversity dynamics by developing a Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) providing advanced modelling, simulation and prediction capabilities. By exploiting existing technologies and data from relevant research infrastructures in new ways, BioDT will be able to accurately and quanti...
18 July 2022
The EGU General Assembly 2023 will be held on site at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV), Austria, with online components provided to enable virtual attendance, from 23 to 28 April 2023.You can take an active part in organizing the scientific programme of the conference, from now until 19 September 2022, by suggesting sessions with conveners and description in your preferred programme group. You have the possibility of proposing either physical oral/poster sessions with a hybrid component or hybrid...
17 July 2022
eLTER would like to welcome three new people to its Head Office: Claudia Schuetze, Charlotte Wiederkehr and Uta Koedel.Claudia Schuetze has her background in physics and geophysics and held a professorship in electrical engineering. She has worked for the UFZ since 2009 and coordinated several geophysical research projects. Since 2017 she has led the implementation and coordination of the MOSES RI (Modular Observation Solutions for Earth Systems) of the German Helmholtz Community. This rese...
17 July 2022
The ILTER scientific conference will take place this year in Novi Sad, Serbia, 12-14 October, 2022. The conference will be open to all interested parties. It will be held side-by-side with the annual ILTER Coordinating Committee meeting. CC members will receive a separate message regarding that meeting.Each presenting author will be required to register for the conference. The Website address for registration will be distributed in due time. The registration fee (stated in Euros, including local...
15 July 2022
SITES (Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science) is a national infrastructure for terrestrial and limnological field research that partners with eLTER.SITES aims to promote high-quality research through long-term field measurements and field experiments, and by making data and station access available to researchers, regardless of institution. The core of SITES is nine field research stations that represent a variety of Swedish climate zones and ecosystems, including agricultural land, fores...
14 July 2022
Around 400 scientists visited the ENVRI booth during the EGU 2022 event in Vienna, lasting from 23 to 27 May. This marks a significant increase from the last physical EGU event where the booth was also visited by 400 people. However, this year the on site participants were over 2 times fewer than in 2019.eLTER was presented by its head of communication Kaloyan Konstantinov who was offering information about the RI, our brand new brochure, and a number of ENVRI goodies like a coloring book, Rubik...
14 July 2022
The SOILSERV ANR project conducted from 2017-2021 combined biophysical and socio-economic approaches to assess at different spatial scales ecosystem services of agricultural soils within mixed agroecosystems involving crops, livestock and uncultivated areas and to analyse their economic valuation in farmers’ choices or their consideration in territory planning. To address the various scales, the project relied on three main study sites selected as they offer sound existing preliminary infor...
12 July 2022
Dr Jan Dick is a social ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), a member of the LTER-UK’s Environmental Change Network (ECN) team and an active contributor to eLTER. Jan gave a talk recently, during which she described UKCEH's interest in using passive acoustic monitoring techniques. She was speaking at the UK Acoustic Network's symposium in Manchester (15-16 June 2022).Jan presented work by eLTER that aims to define a set of standard observations and associated methods,...
10 July 2022
The first BioDT webinar presents the project's objectives and goals, and its interaction with the LUMI Supercomputer, fundamental for building its modelling and simulation capabilities. The discussion will pave the way for the four BioDT use case groups and how their development can help scientists in predicting future trends in the biodiversity field. The event gives also the opportunity to meet the people behind the project and to interact with them during a poll session and a panel...
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...
9 December 2020
The managing institutions that operate six different continental-scale ecosystem observing infrastructures, from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America (two from Europe), signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Tuesday 1 December, 2020, expressly committing to the development of the first-ever Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI). This GERI is an integrated network of site-based research infrastructures dedicated to better understand the function and ch...
29 October 2020
The two EU projects eLTER PPP and eLTER PLUS already had to hold their kick-off meeting in virtual form during the first wave of the COVID- 19 pandemic in March 2020. While eLTER PLUS collects and analyses the requirements of a wide range of eLTER actors and users (politics, science, peer organisations, etc.), eLTER PPP forges the eLTER RI design accordingly and negotiates with future donors in around 20 countries. The large consortia of the two projects are made up of experts from different fie...
1 October 2020
While eLTER PLUS collects and analyses requirements from a wide range of eLTER stakeholder and users (policy, science, peer organizations etc.), the eLTER PPP forges the eLTER RI design accordingly and negotiates with future funders in about 20 countries.
Therefore, it is crucial that the teams in both projects work in full awareness of related activities within and across the two projects. In comparison to usual project working styles, this implies a vivid working culture, effectiv...
15 September 2020
Using eLTER long-term site data, a recently published article by Veronika Fontana et al. investigates beta biodiversity patterns in pastured grasslands in the European Alps. The article is published in the Scientific Reports open-access journal and is titled “Species richness and beta diversity patterns of multiple taxa along an elevational gradient in pastured grasslands in the European Alps”.
The study investigates in parallel species richness and beta diversity components of nine taxo...
22 July 2020
Using eLTER site data, a recently published article by Francesca Pilotto et al. investigates biodiversity trends in Europe. The article is published in the Nature Communications journal and is titled “Meta-analysis of Multidecadal Biodiversity Trends in Europe”.
The new study uses a comprehensive dataset of 161 biological time series across Europe mostly collected from eLTER sites. This unique dataset covers 21 European countries, nine biogeoregions, three realms and eight taxonomic groups. T...
19 May 2020
COVID-19 might have altered our lives in the last few months, but at eLTER we have proved our resilience and determination for success through the extremely fruitful and inspiring kick off meetings of our two projects - eLTER PPP and eLTER PLUS (30 March - 03 April 2020). In the space of just a few weeks we’ve moved the two events fully online, with no cuts to the initially planned programme. We missed on a traditional group photo but we kept our spirits high through improvising severa...
17 April 2020
At the end of March, 2020, while COVID-19 continued to spread across the globe, more than 100 scientists of the integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological systems Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) convened virtually to kick off a five-year effort to strengthen Europe’s capacity for long-term ecological observation and research though its two new projects (Horizon2020 Advanced Communities “eLTER PLUS” and the eLTER RI Preparatory Phase Project). While the confere...