A coordinated set of ecosystem research platforms open to international research in ecotoxicology, AnaEE-France

Human activities have altered continental ecosystems worldwide and generated a major environmental crisis. To truly develop integrative ecosystem biology and to assess the consequences of various forcing factors, such as pollutions, we therefore need new approaches and tools that bridge the traditional gap between life and environmental sciences. To deal with that challenge, the infrastructure for Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems (AnaEE-France) is an integrated network of the major French experimental, analytical and modeling platforms dedicated to the biological study of continental ecosystems, both aquatic and terrestrial. This infrastructure aims at understanding and predicting ecosystem dynamics under global change. It comprises five complementary nodes offering access to the best experimental facilities and associated biological resources and data: Ecotrons, semi-natural experimental platforms to manipulate terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, in natura sites equipped for large scale and long-term experiments. AnaEE-France also provides shared instruments and analytical platforms dedicated to environmental (micro)-biology. Finally, AnaEE-France provides users with data bases and modeling tools designed to represent ecosystem dynamics and to go further in coupling ecological, agronomical and evolutionary approaches. AnaEE-France offers adequate services to tackle the new challenges of research in ecotoxicology, positioning its various types of platforms in an ecologically advanced ecotoxicology approach. AnaEE-France is a leading international infrastructure and it is pioneering the construction of a European AnaEE infrastructure in the field of ecosystem research. This infrastructure is open to the international community of scientists in the field of continental ecotoxicology.