News
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...
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...