International research infrastructures

Some of our research platforms are part of European distributed research infrastructures. What all European research infrastructures have in common is that they involve a wide range of partners across Europe and aim to address the challenges of our time and increase the impact of research. Research infrastructures provide access to state-of-the-art research platforms and research infrastructure services. The collaboration aims to find synergies between both knowledge and resources. Technology and methodologies can be developed and harmonised within the framework of common research infrastructures. Higher quality and more efficient research is on the horizon of European cooperation.

Maintaining the productivity of agricultural, forest and aquatic ecosystems is a key issue for the future of the planet. In order to safeguard the services provided by ecosystems and to develop a sustainable bioeconomy, scientific knowledge is needed on how climate change, biodiversity loss and land use change affect these ecosystems. AnaEE provides the capacity to develop multidisciplinary approaches combining experimentation, analysis and modelling services. It provides easy access to a wide range of infrastructures and resources. It is based on geographical diversity, which allows the observation of diverse ecosystems.

The AnaEE (Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems) research infrastructure will help to analyse, model and predict how different European ecosystems will respond to climate change and how they can be sustainably maintained. AnaEE is a research infrastructure organised as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), bringing together a number of state-of-the-art ecosystem research experimentation and analysis platforms across Europe. By combining platforms with modelling methods, AnaEE will contribute to the understanding of the environmental impacts of global change and develop adaptation and mitigation strategies to safeguard ecosystem services and their economic and social benefits.

AnaEE-ERIC's research platforms can be used to study agricultural, aquatic and peatland ecosystems, as well as to conduct forestry experiments, climate manipulations and laboratory-scale testing. The services provided by AnaEE-ERIC will focus on transnational access (TA) and additional platform services available to the user when visiting the platform through AnaEE.

Luke coordinates the AnaEE Finland activities, and the AnaEE Finland coordination office is located in Luke's Viikki office.

eLTER RI (European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research infrastructure) is a European distributed research infrastructure focused on addressing major environmental challenges such as global warming, biodiversity loss and pressures on natural resources. Tackling these problems requires world-class ecosystem research: research platforms and equipment supporting a well-connected and broad community of experts, openly shared and easily accessible data, and capacity building programmes. eLTER provides a long time series of measurements on a wide range of ecosystems.

eLTER is an ESFRI project, i.e. it is now in the Preparation phase on its way to becoming a full-fledged research infrastructure. A preparatory project (2020-2025) funded by the European Commission will support this process. 

DEIMS-SDR (Dynamic Ecological Information Management System - Site and Dataset Registry) is an information management system implemented by eLTER. It provides access to long-term ecosystem research sites around the world, the data collected at these sites, and the people and networks associated with them. DEIMS-SDR describes a wide range of sites and provides a wealth of information, including the location of each site, ecosystems, facilities, measured parameters and research themes. In addition, a growing number of datasets and data products related to the sites can be used.

DEIMS-SDR is one of the service components of the emerging eLTER research infrastructure. It will be used as a registry of eLTER sites, but will also provide services to European peers and global user communities.

Luke is involved in the development of the eLTER research infrastructure at national level, which is coordinated by University of Helsinki.

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is constantly rising, warming our planet. Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions is essential to predict climate change and mitigate its consequences.

The Integrated Carbon Observation System, ICOS, provides standardised and transparent data from more than 140 monitoring stations in 14 European countries. Both off-the-shelf data products and data sets are available. The stations monitor greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and carbon fluxes between the atmosphere, the land surface and the oceans. ICOS is therefore based on three components: atmosphere, ecosystem and ocean.

The ICOS community comprises more than 500 scientists from existing member and observer countries, as well as from other countries. More than 80 well-known universities or institutions are part of the ICOS community, which has strong links with colleagues and actors outside ICOS. ICOS knowledge supports policy and decision making to combat climate change and its impacts.

Luke is involved in the implementation of ICOS collaborative research experiments and development of standardised data production.

ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) is a strategic instrument to develop Europe's scientific integration and strengthen its international competitiveness at the forefront of science. Competitive and open access to high-quality research infrastructures supports and defines the quality of European researchers' work and attracts the best researchers from all over the world. ESFRI is at the forefront of European and global science policy and contributes to its development by translating policy objectives into concrete advice for European research and innovation.

Every few years, ESFRI updates the roadmap for pan-European research infrastructures. The roadmap serves as a long-term development plan for European research infrastructures. The roadmap is based on an evaluation of projects that are expected to deliver world-class research infrastructures to the research community, support product development in industry and provide high quality information to support decision making.