Literature Review of Ecosystem Service Virtual Laboratories

Efforts towards developing and using virtual laboratories are increasing across the world. Virtual laboratories provide a platform for collaborative research without geographical or temporal boundaries. There is, however, a need for improving the coherence of structures providing virtual laboratories, especially concerning ecosystem services. This paper is a literature review on virtual laboratories with an emphasis on the ecosystem service sector. It provides recommendations and ideas to assist in closing the gap of coherencies of the complexities in this sector. The literaure report formed part of the work done in the Finnish Environement Institute (SYKE) to develop an assessment framework for ecosystem services (ESLab) and was linked to the LifeWatch project, funded by the Academy of Finland, and to the CLIMES project, funded by the Academy of Finland and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.