A network for life.

Biodiversity is at the heart of ecosystem health and functioning--which, in turn, provides the foundation for human flourishing. ALTER-Net brings together international natural and social science researchers from 18 European countries to integrate our understanding of biodiversity, ecosystems, and the services they provide to society and to create a platform for meaningful communication with policy-makers and the public.

Objectives.

ALTER-Net brings together leading institutes from 18 European countries. They share the goal of integrating their research capability to: assess changes in biodiversity, analyse the effect of those changes on ecosystem services and inform the public and policy makers about this at a European scale.

ALTER-Net enables integration among its network of partner institutes. Transdisciplinary in nature, ALTER-Net partners bring together expertise from both the natural and social sciences and supports platforms for high-impact interactions with policymakers, the scientific community, and the public.

• Facilitating and engaging with the science-policy interface, including through management of the EKLIPSE mechanism

• Hosting the ALTER-Net Summer School in Peyresq, which has been providing training for young researchers in inter-disciplinary approaches to biodiversity and ecosystems research since 2006

• Bringing together diverse scientific, policy, stakeholder, and NGO perspectives for bi-annual ALTER-Net Conferences, developed in cooperation with the European Commission
• Supporting high-impact research on pressing topical issues facing science and society through the AHIA initiative
• Funding multi-site research projects that take advantage of ALTER-Net's pan-European facilities through the MSR initiative
• Supporting international partner research and exchange through our Mobility Fund

• Communicating and promoting targeted knowledge transfer with the scientific community, policymakers, and the public

• Enabling international consortium building and internal sharing of funding opportunities through the Call Exchange clearing house mechanism

• Supporting research infrastructure, including the LTER-Europe network of Long-Term Ecosystem Research sites (LTER), Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research platforms (LTSER) and LifeWatch; ALTER-Net was instrumental in developing this major European research infrastructure
• Establishing a vibrant international and interdiscplinary ecosystems and biodiversity research community