Core Communities

Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) is an essential component of worldwide efforts to better understand ecosystems. This comprises their structure, functions, and long-term response to environmental, societal and economic drivers. LTER contributes to the knowledge base informing policy and to the development of management options in response to the Grand Challenges under Global Change. LTER-Europe features LTSER Platforms, acting as test infrastructures for a new generation of ecosystem research across European environmental and socio-economic gradients.

ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System) is a new European research infrastructure (RI) with the mission to enable research to understand the greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets and perturbations in Europe and adjacent regions. ICOS is based on the collection of high-quality observational data by measurement stations operated long-term (15+ years) as national networks in the RI member states.

ELIXIR builds a sustainable pan-European infrastructure for biological information, supporting life science research and its translation to medicine, agriculture, bioindustries and society. ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the massive amounts of data being generated every day by publicly funded research.

The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) project aimed at making collaborative investigation of the human body possible across all the relevant scales (from the level of molecules through cells and organs to the whole body). It introduced multiscale methodologies (that is, working on different scales within the body) into medical and clinical research – for example, in predictive disease modelling or to optimize cancer treatment for an individual.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is the integrated solid Earth Sciences research infrastructure approved by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and included in the ESFRI Roadmap in December 2008. EPOS is a long-term integration plan of national existing Research Infrastructures (RIs). The establishment of EPOS will foster worldwide interoperability in Earth Sciences and provide services to a broad community of users.

The European Network for Earth System Modeling (ENES) is developing a common climate and Earth system modeling distributed research infrastructure in Europe integrating the European community on Earth’s climate System Models (ESMs) and their hardware, software, and data environments.

CLARIN is the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure in Europe. Its main aim is to provide scholars in the humanities and social sciences with easy access to digital language data (in written, spoken, video or multimodal form) and to advanced tools for finding, exploring, using, annotating, analysing or combining such data, no matter where it is located.