LTER France

eLTER-France is the French mirror of the European ESFRI project eLTER. eLTER France aims at building a French open infrastructure connecting earth science, ecological and social-ecological approaches by giving access to a distributed network of coordinated sites and platforms covering the full range of French ecosystems, climate, geological, land use zones and socio-economic. eLTER France is gathering two National Research Infrastructures: the LTSER Réseau des Zones Ateliers and the CZO network OZCAR, both developing a systemic approach at landscape scale.
The Zones Ateliers Network is a consortium of c. 1,800 researchers & technicians belonging to 100 institutions & universities, addressing fundamental questions arising from societal needs. It is organized around 14 various (agricultural, marine, alpine, urban, watersheds, savannah) Long Term Socio-Ecological platforms, most of them existing since 2000 or before. It is supported by the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS). In the Zone Atelier, Long Term Socio-Ecological Research is conducted at landscape scale over the years, addressing major environmental issues and conducting research action with all stakeholders to improve resilience of social-ecological systems to global change.

The OZCAR (Critical Zone Observatories: Research and Application) network is a nationally distributed research infrastructure associating most of the French observation sites dedicated to the observation and monitoring of the Critical Zone, the geological interface lying between the sky and the rocks, from high mountains to coastal areas. OZCAR is supported by the French Ministry of Education and Research and sites/observatories are funded by different research institutes, including universities. OZCAR includes more than 60 highly instrumented sites/observatories for long-term measurements of biological, chemical and physical parameters of groundwater, river water, glaciers, soils, and wetlands in France and overseas. All sites share the overarching question issue of predicting the response of the CZ to perturbations ranging from the second to millions of year. OZCAR gathers about 800 scientists, engineers and technicians contributing to data acquisition and research within OZCAR.