Project Summary

The project EnvEurope was born and will develop inside the European Long-Term Ecosystem Research Network (LTER-Europe) community.

The project aims at the integration and coordination at the European level of long-term ecological research and monitoring initiatives, focused on understanding trends and changes of environmental quality, and on the elaboration of relevant detection systems and methods.

The main target of the project EnvEurope is the analysis of the ecosystem status and the definition of appropriate environmental quality indicators with an integrated long-term, broad scale, cross-domain (terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems) approach, joining the efforts of 11 countries belonging to the LTER Europe network.

EnvEurope proposes the design of environmental quality monitoring and research sites and the establishing of common parameter sets to be collected across the largest network of long-term ecological research sites in Europe.

Focusing on three types of ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater and marine) it aims at defining measures relevant to different scales of investigation, with specific monitoring intensities and with methods adjusted to the respective assessment intensity, implementing a multi-level and multi-functional approach.

A further target of the project is the selection of a core list of ecological parameters, indicators and indexes, useful to analyze, compare and report environmental quality in the international context.