LTER Platform: Requirement, Technology and Trend

Objective of the long-term ecological research is to monitor environmental changes due to climate change and track the consequences, to cope with the environmental issues that may arise now and in the future. Long-term ecological research addresses the temporal gap between short-term studies by studying processes on time scales from months to decades. For long-term ecological researches, a system (Cyber Infrastructure) is essential, which can continuously harvest and manage the data about ecosystem changes. Requirements of a long-term ecological research system are very diverse; standardized interface, sharing and data integration, flexibility, standardized vocabulary, and so on. To deal with these issues, countries around the world have been building platforms that can harvest and manage the data about ecosystem changes for long-term ecological researches. This paper presents requirements and technologies for the long-term ecological research platform, and examines current technological trends in order to meet various requirements of the long-term ecological research.