Abstract
Five years after its establishment (2016), the LTER-Greece network outlines its vision, aims, objectives and its achievements through a series of case studies. The network consists of eight observatories, focusing on innovative research topics, aiming to be both cooperative and complementary, while currently being in the process of expanding. LTER-Greece acknowledges the complexity of ecosystems and the fact that effective management of natural resources may only be achieved by addressing every sector of a nexus system in order to understand inter-dependencies, thus accounting for solutions that promote resilience. Hence, LTER-Greece focuses on the holistic study of the water-environment-ecosystem-food-energy-society nexus, in order to face environmental and socio-ecological challenges at local and global scales, particularly climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, natural disasters and unsustainable water and land management. Framed around five research pillars, monitoring and research targets nine research hypotheses related to climate change, environmental management, socio-ecology and economics, biodiversity and environmental process dynamics. As environmental monitoring and related research and conservation in Greece face critical shortcomings, LTER-Greece envisages confronting these gaps and contributing with interdisciplinary solutions to the current and upcoming complex environmental challenges.
Highlights
During the past century, humanity has experienced unprecedented increases in population, resulting in increased food, water and energy demands, and this trend is expected to continue during this century
The objective of this paper is to describe the design of the Long-term Ecological Research (LTER)-Greece network, its research priorities as well as recent interdisciplinary research collaboration results, as a means of demonstrating its service to society and the environment
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Summary
Humanity has experienced unprecedented increases in population, resulting in increased food, water and energy demands, and this trend is expected to continue during this century. Its role is to provide fundamental understanding of natural processes necessary to conserve, protect and manage ecosystem biodiversity and services Another international example is the Critical Zone Exploration Network (CZEN) (https://www.czen.org, accessed on 15 April 2021), aiming to investigate processes within the Critical Zone, which is defined as the layer of the Earth that sustains life outwards from bedrock to treetop. Mitigation of extreme events, together with reversing the trends of biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, aquatic quality deterioration and overfishing, complement the puzzle of environmental management that needs to be solved in the few decades, in order to prevent catastrophic environmental degradation in Greece Within this frame, the LTER-Greece was established in order to contribute to science-based solutions for such challenges. The objective of this paper is to describe the design of the LTER-Greece network, its research priorities as well as recent interdisciplinary research collaboration results, as a means of demonstrating its service to society and the environment
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