TERENO – A New Network of Terrestrial Observatories for Global Change Research

Abstract

Climate change and land use changes are the most important factors of Global Change which have to be managed by the society. Changes in terrestrial systems take place at different spatial and temporal scales. In order to address the challenges of Global Change, interdisciplinary research in terrestrial environmental science is of great importance. Therefore, long-term operated Global Change Observatories for scientific monitoring, analyzing and predicting state variables and fluxes within the different environmental compartments are of special importance. Terrestrial systems are extremely complex. Despite its complexity, the terrestrial component in most process-based climate and biosphere models is typically represented in a very conceptual and often rudimentary way. Remedying this deficiency is therefore one of the most important challenges in environmental and terrestrial research. Thus long-term operated Terrestrial Observatories are an important step towards a new quality in Global Change research. The infrastructure activity TERENO (Terrestrial Environmental Observatories), a research initiative of the Helmholtz Association, establishes a network of Terrestrial observatories in different sensitive and representative regions in cooperation with universities and national and international organisations. The observed terrestrial system consists of the subsurface environment, the land surface including the biosphere, the lower atmosphere and the anthroposphere. Hydrological units are used as the basic scaling units in a hierarchy of evolving scales and structures ranging from the local scale to the regional scale for multi-disciplinary process studies. Four Terrestrial Observatories in Germany are currently established: the Lower Rhine Valley/Eifel Observatory, the Harz/Central German Lowland Observatory, the Bavarian Alps/pre-Alps Observatory (consisting of the Ammer catchment, the long-term research stations Hoeglwald and Scheyern and the Northeastern Lowland Observatory.