Humanity is facing enormous environmental challenges: biodiversity decline, climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, overpopulation, etc. “These challenges are transnational in nature and trans-institutional in solution. They cannot be addressed by any single government or institution acting alone. These challenges require collaborative action among governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, NGOs, and creative individuals...” (The Millennium Project. UNO. 2009).

On the other hand, Research Infrastructures (RI’s) have developed significantly over the last decades. RI’s are now key players in many of the latest advances and discoveries in science. The information gathered by environmental RI’s is helping us to understand the structure and functioning of natural systems at local and regional scales in the face of unprecedented environmental change. The science provided by long term ecological and environmental research has demonstrated to be very useful for ecology and decision making.

This session will be an opportunity to bring together scientists, RI’s operators, practitioners and stakeholders interested on how RI’s can help to address environmental problems at different scales. This session will explore how the ecosystem of international environmental RI’s establish cooperation threads to tackle scientific and environmental problems.

Contributions will cover, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
Examples of cooperation among cross-domain or cross-scale RI’s to address new scientific challenges.
Case studies of data interoperability, reusability, data exchange, workflow management, virtual laboratories and other ecoinformatics approaches involving two or more international RI’s.
Examples of co-location of RI’ facilities aiming to address local, regional or global scientific/environmental challenges.
Conceptual contributions that envision the future of cooperation among international RI’s.