LTER-Europe has teamed up with the LIFE+ project EnvEurope for its annual meeting in Rome this week. It should be an important event.
The meeting is an opportunity for infrastructure managers and scientific users interested in LTER-Europe to meet and hear about the science that LTER-Europe helps deliver and to exchange ideas, strengthen interactions, identify development priorities and explore possible collaborative projects.
In building a site network for biodiversity and ecosystem research since 2004, LTER-Europe has identified a set of requirements in the field of cross-site workflows, network design, tools for information management, harmonization and standardization. The LIFE+ project EnvEurope has successfully tackled these requirements over the past 4 years (2010-2013). The products of EnvEurope and the approaching Horizon 2020 are the entry point for the next phase in designing the European research infrastructure landscape in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem research.
A key challenge for LTER-Europe, with its highly instrumented observational sites and socio-ecological research platforms, is how best to cooperate and integrate with both large scale monitoring schemes (including remote sensing) and experimental approaches. The interaction with key stakeholders at the joint conference in Rome will form a milestone on this way.
The meeting programme and other information is available from the EnvEurope website.