EnvEurope

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

Summary: A vast range of environmental data are currently collected across Europe, both at national and international level, generating valuable information for policy-makers and citizens. However, much of these data are incomparable, constituting a major obstacle to the development of well informed environmental policies and strategies at European level. Scientifically sound, reliable, accessible and timely data, gathered with harmonized methods and protocols are required. These should provide comparable, spatially detailed ecological information at the level of ecosystems.

The Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) seeks to meet this challenge. Developed by the European Commission, together with the EEA and Member States, the system works to interconnect local, national and international databases to maximise the efficient use of the available information.

The European Long-Term Ecosystem Research Network (LTER-Europe) was recently established under the FP6 Network of Excellence ALTER-Net. It is building on the existing infrastructure of 11 countries to make combined use of the available data. The project aims to build on the work of the LTER to provide an analysis of the long-term ecological data and its comparison across eco-domains. It will supply relevant scientific support to EU environmental policy and conservation plans in an integrated ecosystem approach.

The project will provide an integrated management system for ecological data on the status and long-term trends of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystem quality at European and lesser scales. It will provide data by habitat types - including Natura 2000 network sites - and environmental gradients.

The project will work to ensure there are semantically consistent data architectures, enabling seamless drill down from metadata to data, accessible not only to the scientific community, but also to policymakers and stakeholders. Access to information and resources will be further expanded beyond the current LTER approach. The project team will set-up an integrated and permanent system to detect and evaluate changes in environmental quality in the field across Europe. To do this, it will develop harmonised methods, proposed and shared by the whole LTER scientific and technical community.

The work of the project will enable the team to develop a set of key environmental quality indicators, based on an exchange between stakeholders - particularly researchers and policymakers. This will help ensure both indicator quality and acceptance. Experiences from this project will be invaluable to the ongoing development of the technical components of the Shared Environmental System for Europe (SEIS).

For more information, please visit EurOcean Knowledge Gate.