eLTER H2020, which runs until 2019, will serve as the flagship for the further development of the Long-term Ecosystem Research infrastructure and community in Europe. eLTER H2020 will closely interact with two other major elements in this effort:

• eLTER ESFRI process, a formalization process in the framework of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (eLTER was recently accepted as an “emerging ESFRI infrastructure”)
• LTER-Europe network of national networks (25 countries with a pool of around 400 LTER Sites and 35 LTSER Platforms). LTER-Europe is the formal European regional group of the global ILTER network. It provides multiple networking activities with permanent governance structures.

The specific role of eLTER H2020 is to catalyze conceptual and service developments of a distributed, highly integrated and widely used research infrastructure to support a wide range of ecosystem and critical zone research questions, such as:

• How are ecosystems and biodiversity changing or adapting to global-change stresses?
• What are the determinants of ecosystem resilience?
• What are the threshold interactions resulting in system shifts?
• How can we respond locally, nationally and internationally to support systems that are more resilient to global change effects?

Simplified overview of the eLTER H2020 project and its environment

To this end eLTER H2020 comprises the following components:

• Four exemplary scientific use cases with increasing level of complexity to assess LTER data quality and services;
• IT architecture and tool development alongside the use cases;
• Detailed specification of eLTER design towards ESFRI;
• Concerted data delivery of selected 162 LTER sites (Virtual Access);
• Supported access to 18 top ecosystem research sites (Transnational Access);
• Research infrastructure integration (nationally, Europe, globally).

Source: eLTER