AnaEE – Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems

AnaEE-ERIC’s whole approach can be summed up in five M’s: Manipulation, Measurement, Modelling, Mitigation, and Management. It brings together a series of state-of-the-art experimental, analytical and modelling platforms for ecosystem research throughout Europe. AnaEE forges evidence-based adaptation and mitigation strategies that assure plant, soil, water, biodiversity and ecosystem health today and in the future. Those strategies are needed to maintain essential services to society, including adaptation to climate change, carbon sequestration, food security, clean water, and preservation of biodiversity.

At the core is a network of distributed experimental facilities, where ecosystems are exposed to controlled, and manipulated, conditions. The results produced from our platforms inform predictive models and deliver realistic simulations of global change impacts. In AnaEE, the experimental approach is integrated with modelling to quantify and predict the impact of those current and future global change drivers on ecosystem functioning, to help unravel mechanisms and feedback involved in ecosystems’ responses, and to test mitigation and adaptation measures. The originality and added value compared to other international RIs rest with AnaEE’s versatile facilities that can simulate changes in environmental drivers ranging from land-use change, agricultural management practices and systems, pollution, biological invasions, rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, to climatic changes, including extreme events such as droughts and heat waves. 

AnaEE has the potential to look into the future, thanks to the integrative and coordinated usage of its experimental, analytical and modelling facilities. AnaEE-ERIC provide services through four main types of installations: Open Air ecosystem platforms comprise the predominant land use types of European continental ecosystems, spanning from managed agricultural to ‘unmanaged’, natural ecosystems including terrestrial aquatic ecosystems, transecting Europe’s climatic zones from the subarctic to Mediterranean; Enclosed ecosystem platforms, complement Open Air platforms by enabling a much higher level of environmental control and measurements on ecosystem processes. Analytical platforms offer advanced biological, physical and chemical and socio-economical analyses for a deeper insight into processes. Modelling platforms give access to existing, state of the art, numerical models and to advanced software facilities for model development (model factories) that will improve data analysis and synthesis and allow predictions of the responses of ecosystems to global changes.

ERIC establishment: 22.02.2022

AnaEE-ERIC Commission Implementing Decision: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022D0289&from=EN