EnvEurope Project

Environmental quality and pressures assessment across Europe: the LTER network as an integrated and shared system for ecosystem monitoring

Growing concern about environmental conditions has driven efforts to study and monitor the ecosystem status and trends. The evaluation of the effects of human activities on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems is often hampered by the difficulty to separate man-made from natural changes and to define baselines against which to evaluate changes. The gathering and the availability of long-term ecological data represent a powerful tool to deal with these crucial constrains. The potential of long-term ecological monitoring to recognize and interpret environmental changes is best realized when data on ecosystems are gathered at a broad geographical scale with a comparative methodological and conceptual approach.

The integration of long-term ecological research and monitoring at a broad geographical scale and across eco-domains requires efficient data access and sharing. Ecological monitoring and consistent reporting systems need to be improved across Europe – a challenge tackled by the process Shared Environmental Information System for Europe (SEIS) and the initiative GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

Within this context, the project “EnvEurope” proposes a design for environmental high quality monitoring sites and the exemplary establishment of common parameter sets to be collected across the largest site-based network of Long-Term Ecosystem Research in Europe (LTER Europe: www.lter-europe.net). LTER Europe was established under the auspices of the FP6 Network of Excellence ALTER-Net, building on existing infrastructures and thus a lot of valuable data series. It focuses on three types of ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater and marine ones), and aims at streamlining standard procedures required to support scientific research and ecological monitoring and increase the visibility of LTER-Europe as a reference network for policy makers and environmental managers at the European level.

The current LTER Europe network (400 ca. sites across 22 European countries) consists of national networks. The national networks have their own governance structures and, even though, they share the common the objectives of LTER-Europe in the sites managed by their members, there is a strong need of harmonization at the European level. For the project EnvEurope a preliminary selection of 20% ca. of the total LTER Europe sites, as key-examples of ecological, geographical and ecosystem variability across Europe, has already been made by the project Associated Beneficiaries – all representing their national networks - with the aim to define and test harmonized methods (see selected sites in the map below).