An integrated research infrastructure concept with multidisciplinary observations on climate change

The observations on global warming or elements relevant to climate change are frequently performed in isolation, which results in insufficient understanding of the whole Earth system functioning and feedbacks. Frequently CO2 emissions, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the global air temperature records are pooled together to obtain statistical relationships and correlations between them. However, forecasting future changes and designing tools for mitigating their deleterious effects would require a more holistic and comprehensive observation scheme. We propose a concept of an integrated research infrastructure, where the feedbacks can be analysed with multidisciplinary and comprehensive observations. The SMEAR concept (Station for Measuring Earth system-Atmosphere Relations) has been developing into a powerful tool, allowing detection of trends in key climate, atmosphere and ecosystem parameters, providing detailed process understanding of atmosphere and ecosystem structure and functions, and facilitating deep insights on feedbacks between the ecosystems and atmosphere. The presentation gives examples of recent novel results, especially in the perspective of climate change feedbacks and mitigation in forest ecosystems.