Geospatial data infrastructure components deployed for LTER-Europe Researchers' community

Assessing the status and trends of the environment requires the collection, management and publication of spatially referred observations. Since many years, Long-Term Ecological Research sites in Europe collect ecological data, resulting in long-term data series. Nowadays, advanced software tools can enable discovering, accessing, and distributing collected data in a user friendly way. Based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, Web based Geographic Information System allows access to interoperable distributed repositories of observations. The present paper gives an overview of the methods and solutions proposed and tested in the LIFE+ project EnvEurope for the community of researchers of the Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) Network in Europe. These solutions consist in a straightforward online environment for metadata management and discovery, shaped on the ecological community and its practices; components of a Spatial Data Infrastructure including both a network of repositories deploying observations via OGC SOS (Sensor Observation Service) services and Web user interfaces to access and visualize them. The success of the presented approach is linked to the development and availability of easy to define, ready to use tools, enabling site managers to create their own repositories and services.