Progress in understanding, managing and securing current and future ecosystem functions and services is challenged by fragmented and dispersed ecosystem research, operated using narrow disciplinary perspectives that prevent a holistic understanding of complex eco- and socio-ecological systems. The emerging European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological systems Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) was evaluated by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) as having high potential for closing this gap in the European RI landscape. The primary objective of eLTER PLUS is to open and expand the research capacities and impact of eLTER by engaging current and new users and developing the operations of cross- and transdisciplinary research, exemplified in eLTER Site and Platform design and the RI’s Standard Observation framework. eLTER PLUS will execute a performance test of the emerging RI and assess and strengthen its operations in real time. It will further advance community building and provisioning of services as pursued by the H2020-funded eLTER INFRAIA Starting Community project and related projects. Its focus is on making intensive use of 35 selected sites and platforms in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal ecosystems, combined with observational data from an additional 50 sites, for studying ecosystem and socio-ecological responses to globally-relevant environmental challenges in terms of ecosystem integrity and ecosystem services. Its Whole-Systems approach will derive meaningful scientific and policy-relevant information via co-designed, transdisciplinary research in collaboration with diverse stakeholders at local, regional and EU-scales. Concerted actions also focus on collaboration with peer RIs to maximize synergies, increase efficiencies and catalyze holistic understanding of ecosystem function, and on development of virtual laboratories where in-situ site data are linked with other data sources, e.g. Copernicus.

Being one of the main actions of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the European Biodiversity Partnership (Biodiversa+) will coordinate research programmes between EU and its Member States and Associated Countries, mobilising environmental authorities as key partners for implementing biodiversity research and innovation, along with ministries of research, funding organisations, and environmental protection agencies (75 organisations from 37 countries). Biodiversa+ has five overarching objectives: (1) improve monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem services across Europe (status and trends); (2) generate actionable knowledge to tackle the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss; (3) expand and improve the evidence base, and accelerate the development and wide deployment of NbS to meet societal challenges across Europe; (4) make the business case for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity; and (5) ensure efficient science-based support for biodiversity policy making in Europe. Biodiversa+ will meet these objectives by (i) setting up a pan-European network of harmonized monitoring schemes, building on existing national/regional monitoring schemes, creating capacity for setting up new schemes, and feeding into the EC Knowledge Center for Biodiversity; (ii) coordinating research programmes between the EU and its Member States and associated countries, thereby ensuring the long-term pan-European research agenda is co-created and implemented; (iii) contributing science-based methodologies to account for and possibly value ecosystem services and the natural capital, and to assess the dependency and impact of businesses on biodiversity and (iv) better linking of R&I programmes to the policy arena, providing greater input to policy making and improving the assessment of policy efficiency. Doing so, Biodiversa+ will help ensure that, by 2030, nature in Europe is back on a path of recovery, and by 2050 people are living in harmony with Nature.