The international long-term ecosystem research and monitoring (LTER) community meets this week in Nantes, France, for its annual meeting.

This year's ILTER meeting hosts are the French LTER network, LTER-France, comprising the Zones Ateliers Network & Critical Zone Observatories. The 25th ILTER annual meeting is being held in conjunction with the French Zone Atelier Biennial Conference. One focus of the meeting is the further development of Long Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER).

The purpose of the joint conference is to bring together researchers, data managers and other experts from environmental sciences and social sciences, along with programme managers and policymakers, to exchange knowledge, to share experiences and research results, to discuss the most recent developments and applications in environmental research and to consider future research.

ECN is ably represented at the meeting by Dr Jan Dick (NERC-CEH), who is closely involved in many aspects of LTER, and particularly the development of LTSER platforms. She oversees ECN monitoring and related research at the ECN Cairngorms site, which is within the UK's first LTSER platform, the Cairngorms National Park.