Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Initiative
The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Initiative (TERI) is a European community initiative, undertaken within the specific RTD programme on Environment and Climate, developed to research effects on terrestrial ecosystems in the context of sustainable development. The overall objective of TERI is to improve the ability to predict the consequences of the interactive effects of changes in land-use, climate, and atmospheric composition and physics on three areas of primary concern for European terrestrial ecosystems: - Carbon, nutrients and water pools and fluxes, and related trace gas emissions; - Biodiversity in terms of its significance for ecosystem functioning; - Future landscape patterning constrained by changes in the above phenomena. TERI aims at: analysing the mechanisms which control these processes and determine these patterns; at understanding, modelling and predicting the ways in which these processes and patterns are disturbed by human activity and climate change; and finally at providing the fundamental scientific basis for a better management of European ecosystems and landscapes thus improving European environmental policies. The initiative will achieve its objectives through the implementation of research on the underlying processes and resulting fluxes linked to the following thematic areas: - 1. Effects of land-use changes; - 2. Effects of climate change and atmospheric composition on ecosystems; - 3. Dynamics of soil organic matter, biogeochemical cycling and hydrological processes; - 3.1. Soil organic matter dynamics; - 3.2. Biogeochemical and water cycles at the ecosystem scale; - 4. Biodiversity, population biology and ecosystem functioning; - 5. Integration, upscaling and scenario studies. The TERI initiative will provide a major input to the scientific basis of Community environmental policy under the Fifth Environmental Action Programme. TERI will, in synergy with national programmes, form the European component of the international project Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE). TERI will be linked with the European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH), another Environment and Climate programme initiative.