LTER Portugal

Portugal has a highly diverse landscape and a wide range of terrestrial, marine and coastal habitats, partly resulting from its location in the transition zone between the Atlantic and Mediterranean bioclimatic domains. Besides climatic and geological processes that promoted such diversity, environmental drivers of diversification include spatial heterogeneity of biotic agents relatively to which the long history of human occupation had a significant role by inducing major changes in the natural ecosystems and shaping the current landscape.
In these anthropogenic landscapes, perceptions about services provided by ecosystems can affect ecosystem structure and function and are central to understand sustainability. Coordinated research networking within and across landscapes experiencing various levels of human influence, direct or indirect, is a great challenge and the framework of LTER-Portugal network. This network, implemented by SPECO (Portuguese Ecological Society), will be developed in the scope of the Iberian Peninsula in close collaboration with the Spanish Association of Terrestrial Ecology. This project is supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology.