Objectives

Provide ecological data and information on long-term trends of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystem quality at the European scale, with reference to habitat types (including Natura 2000 network) and environmental gradients. The core of this activity is the European Long Term Ecosystem Research network (LTER-Europe). The analysis of the long-term ecological series of data and its comparison at the appropriate scales, across eco-domains will supply a relevant scientific support to the EU environmental policy and conservation plans in an integrated ecosystem approach.

Provide and develop an integrated information management system on status and long-term trend of environmental quality both at European level and at several smaller scales. Access to information and resources will be created and expanded beyond the current LTER approach, but capitalizing on its tools. This implies semantically consistent data architectures enabling seamless drill down from metadata to data, accessible not only to the scientific community, but also to policy-makers and stakeholders. Experiences from this activity as a test case and feasibility study will be of high value for the development of the technical components of the Shared Environmental System for Europe (SEIS).

Develop and setting-up in the field an integrated and permanent site-system to detect and evaluate changes in environmental quality across Europe. This objective will be achieved by using harmonized methods, proposed and shared by the whole Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) scientific and technical community, thus substantially contributing to the work of the LTER-Europe expert panel on standardization.

Select, on the basis of ecological long-term data and feasibility test in the field, a set of key environmental quality indicators sensitive to defined major pressures and drivers. This will be done in the context of a joint and interactive knowledge exchange between science and policy, through a process of scientific selection, integration and aggregation on one side, and of knowledge production and use on the other. Within this context the stakeholder perspectives will be integrated as a fundamental tool to determine both indicator quality and acceptance.