Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Infrastructures: Challenges and Opportunities

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Infrastructures: Challenges and Opportunities reveals how environmental research infrastructures (RIs) provide new valuable insights on ecological processes that cannot be realized by more traditional short-term funding cycles and are integral to understand our changing world. This book bonds the latest state-of-the-science knowledge on environmental RIs, the challenges in creating them, their place in addressing scientific frontiers, and the new perspectives they bear. Each chapter is thoughtfully invested with fresh viewpoints from the environmental RI vantage as the authors explore and explain many topics such as the rationale and challenges in global change, field and modeling platforms, new tools, challenges in data management, distilling information into knowledge, and new developments in large-scale RIs. This work serves an advantageous guide for academics and practitioners alike who aim to deepen their knowledge in the field of science and project management, and logistics operations.

Dr. habil. Abad Chabbi, Director of Research at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) is a plant ecologist and soil biogeochemist. He worked at the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the Faculty of Environmental Science in Cottbus, Germany; the University of Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris, France; and at INRA, where he has been leading the National Observatory for Environmental Research-Agro-Ecosystems, Biogeochemical Cycles and Biodiversity (www.soere-acbb.com) since 2009. His current research centers on understanding the link between soil carbon sequestration, nutrient availability and stoichiometry in the plant–soil system, biodiversity, and the influence that land use management and climate change may have on these dynamics. During his career, Dr. Chabbi coordinated a number of international multidisciplinary projects, chaired and organized numerous international symposiums, and edited books and several special issues of leading international journals. He has presented a number of keynote lectures and seminars around the world. Currently, Dr. Chabbi is a member/expert of the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, the Chinese Academy of Science, the Czech Science Foundation, the German Research Science Foundation (DFG), the Hercules Foundation (Hercules Stichting), Belgium; the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), UK; the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), UK; and the European commission (DG Research & Innovation and DG Agriculture and Rural Development). Dr. Chabbi is the coordinator of two strategic European FP7 projects, "ExpeER" (www.expeeronline.eu) and "ANAEE" (www.anaee.com), and deeply involved in ENVRIPlus, a cluster H2020 project. Since April 2013, he has also been leading the C2 component of the Ecosystems Task at Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

Dr. Henry W. Loescher’s career has been at the nexus of science, engineering, and project development. Formally educated as an ecosystem scientist, he received his PhD and MSc from the University of Florida (forest ecology) and undergraduate degrees from the State University of New York (SUNY) and Vermont State College (environmental science, agronomy, and applied science). His active research projects include determining the biotic and abiotic controls on ecosystem-level carbon, water, and energy balance across a range of spatial and temporal scales, and challenging ecological theory. Dr. Loescher is the Director of Strategic Development in the Battelle-National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a first-of-its-kind, continental-scale major research facility that integrates science, engineering, and project management. Dr. Loescher has led multiple NEON Project Science Teams and engineering efforts (instrumentation, mobile deployment, aquatic science, etc.), and he is currently pioneering domestic and international efforts to link large-scale environmental observatories and their "Big Data" to address current and future environmental problems facing society today. As such, he sits on numerous large-project, international advisory boards. Prior to his tenure at NEON, he was at Oregon State University, administrating the DOE AmeriFlux QA/QC Program.