GERI – The emerging Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure

Abstract:

Over the past decade, individual Ecosystem Research Infrastructures around the world have been designed, constructed, and are now in operations to address research questions that require long-term Ecosystem observations at national to continental scales. By design, these Research Infrastructures capture data and provide a wider range of services including access and to data and well instrumented research sites. The coevolution of supporting infrastructures and ecological sciences has developed into new science disciplines such as macrosystems ecology, whereby large-scale and multi-decadal-scale ecological processes are being explored.

Governments, decision-makers, researchers and the public have all recognized that our global economies, quality of life, and the environment are intrinsically intertwined and that ecosystem services ultimately depend on resilient ecological processes now altered and threatened by various components of Global Change like land degradation, global warming and species loss. These threats are the unintended result of increasing anthropogenic activities and have the potential to change the fundamental trajectory of mankind. This creates a unique challenge never before faced by society or science—how to best provide a sustainable economic future while understanding and globally managing a changing environment and human health upon which it relies.

The increasing number of Research Infrastructures around the globe now provides a unique and historical opportunity to respond to this challenge. Six major ecosystem Research Infrastructures (SAEON/South Africa, TERN/Australia, CERN/China, NEON/USA, ICOS/Europe, eLTER/Europe) have started federating to tackle the programmatic work needed for concerted operation and the provisioning of interoperable data and services. This Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) will be presented with a focus on the involved programmatic challenges and the GERI science rationale.