eLTER-NL
Long-Term Ecosystem, Critical Zone & Socio-Ecological Research Infrastructure - Netherlands
Our world is changing at an unprecedented rate, with multiple stressors acting simultaneously, leading to losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Understanding of long-term and systemic effects are needed in order to develop mitigation measures. eLTER-NL, the Dutch partner of eLTER-RI, (1) carries out long-term monitoring on animals, plants, environmental variables within their LTSER platforms: the Wadden Sea, the Veluwe and the Schelde estuary. (2) stores meta-data of these long-term monitoring data, and (3) builds communities around their LTSER platforms. eLTER-NL is also one of the three LSRIs that form LTER-LIFE, which enables researchers to build digital twins of ecosystems.
Infrastructure and User Services
The infrastructure of eLTER-NL can be broken down in three components. (1) Carrying out long-term monitoring on animals, plants, environmental variables and socio-economic parameters within their LTSER platforms: the Wadden Sea, the Veluwe and the Schelde estuary. These monitoring schemes have been started as long as 70 years ago and include both small-scale high quality data collection as well a larger-scale monitoring. Some of this monitoring is done by stand-alone measuring equipment (mainly environmental data) but many of the animal and plant monitoring is carried out by human observers, partly using citizen science. This part of the infrastructure is already in place and well organised. (2) The long-term data collected by many different groups at the same LTER sites is however rarely integrated. For this, eLTER-NL will encourage storing data using the FAIR principles, enabling the integration of these data, using spatial and temporal meta-data, allowing a much better understanding of the multifaceted environmental system. For some of the LTSER sites this has already been organised in project that have now terminated such as for the Wadden Dea, by WaLTER (ended March 2018), for other sites this needs to be developed, and (3) eLTER-NL will build communities of researchers around the LTSER sites in the Netherlands to stimulate synergy between different research projects.
Examples/description of the type of research
A range of research disciplines will be facilitated by eLTER-NL. The integrated long-term data will be instrumental for interdisciplinary natural science research to assess changes in the environment, such as climate change and nitrogen deposition, and combine this with changes in animal and plant abundances. Combined with also the socio-economic data sets, the data will allow investigating human-environment-systems at landscape scales and is thereby of great interest to spatial planning and combining the various function of the landscape, such as economic activities, agriculture, tourism and nature. Furthermore, the socioeconomic experiments at the landscape scale to improve the sustainability of the landscape, such as the living labs of the Deltaplan Biodiversity, require such LTSER-platforms.
Internationally, the LTER sites covered by eLTER-NL are part of eLTER-RI, which is on the ESFRI road map since 2018 (and aims to become an ERIC by the end of 2025), and in this way will also contribute to international research on these disciplines.
How to access the infrastructure?
Access to the LTER sites: Partners already have access to the LTER sites as they have been carrying out measurements for sometimes decades. LTER-NL will strongly encourage other parties to do additional measurements, either short or long term, and will approach research groups that may be interested in doing additional measures at the LTER sites. Access to the integrated and curated metadata: The integrated and curated data are open for everyone for scientific research, provided that the conditions as set by the original data owners (those organizations that collected the data) and by eLTER-NL as a whole are met.