With this innovative platform we will be able to bring the laboratory to the field (rather than report samples to the laboratory with all that that implies as disruption and transformation between the in situ sampling and laboratory analysis). It is composed of a number of complimentary and innovative kits (soil,vegetation, micro climate, microbiology..). Each kit contains mobile state of the art equipement able to fullfill a great number of analytic and monitoring tasks.. It will aim: (i) to characterize environmentally terrestrial ecosystems (especially sites non-instrumented but with great potential to generalize the results obtained on the three nodes of the project (eg experimental devices GIS Data Cooperative - or provenance trials - eg Plantacomp) - the platform will be a major-waiting for inter-study ecosystems (forests, grasslands, crops); (ii) allow campaigns targeted measures at highly instrumented monitoring sites or at other representative sites(instantaneous flow capture special events, unstable compounds) (iii) serve as a support for the development of measures in situ and non-destructive analytic techniques and methods. (soil, vegetation….) Overall, this platform is a facility open acces, usuable by the entire community of environmental sciencists.

An experimental research infrastructure dedicated to the study of ecosystems, organisms and biodiversity in the context of environmental changes. The Ecotron is a laboratory of the Institute of Ecology and Environment (CNRS) open to national and international scientists’ consortia in the fields of ecology, population and community biology and agronomy. The Ecotron allows a precise conditioning of the environment and on line measurements of states and activities (fluxes) of organisms and ecosystems at various scales. This facility bridges the gap between the complexity of in natura studies and the simplicity of laboratory experiments. The research topics to be addressed in the Ecotron include fundamental questions about biogeochemical cycles and the role of biodiversity in ecosystem processes, but tests of ecological theories as well as the applied aspects of optimizing ecosystem services are also desirable projects. http://www.ecotron.cnrs.fr/index.php/en/