ENVRIplus kickoff meeting from 11-13th May in Helsinki was an opportunity for 87 representatives from 19 different Environmental RIs across Europe to meet and set up a foundations for future cooperation.
ENVRIplus is a four year project, from May 2015 to May 2019, with 37 beneficiaries. It is coordinated by the ICOS General Director Werner Kutsch and supported by the co-coordinator Paolo Laj (CNRS, ACTRIS RI), Project Director Ari Asmi (U. Helsinki/ICOS) and Project Manager Magdalena Brus (U. Helsinki/ICOS).
This is a Horizon 2020 project aiming to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of Environmental RIs across Europe, thus making their products and solutions easier to use with each other, improving the cost/benefit ratio of the RI operations and fostering holistic understanding of the Earth System processes and feedbacks.
The leading position of the ICOS in the project, represented by University of Helsinki, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Lund University, University of Tuscia, CEA and GEOMAR, makes the project results directly applicable to the overall ICOS RI development.
Perhaps the most important development for the ICOS community is the overall progress towards far more interoperable research environment in the whole Earth System sciences - this enables far better data usage between different environmental RIs working in different disciplines and parts of the Earth System, thus increasing the predictive power to address the environmental challenges.
Furthermore, ENVRIplus will offer common solutions to shared challenges in areas such as public-private partnerships, interdisciplinary observatories, standardization, data citations methodologies, data processing and curation, RI personnel staff exchange, and RI cluster development.
This ENVRIplus kickoff meeting in Helsinki was not only the step towards more detailed workplan within the project, but also towards building a strong, motivated environmental sciences community with a clear and shared vision.