Stefan Klotz (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ )	Donald Wayne Reeves (USDA) on the right Les FIRBANK (North Wyke Research) on the Left

The ANAEE Workshop 2008 took place in Paris From September 2nd to September 4th.This meeting was the opportunity to assemble the scientific community on continental ecosystems under the vision of common scientific objectives for responding to the major questions of the society on global changes, environment pollution and biodiversity losses. This scientific community has been very fragmented in various disciplinary researches on various types of ecosystems.

Nowadays, facing the challenge of global changes, it is necessary to develop more integrated research allowing:

• the coupling of different processes and environmental fluxes at the level of various ecosystems.
• the coupling of functioning of various ecosystems at landscape or regional level in order to bring relevant responses to society questions.

For that, it is clear that this scientific community has to develop integrated research infrastructures within which the different scientific disciplines could interact together.

It is the aims of ANAEE:

• to conceive these infrastructures,
• to specify them in relation with scientific questions,
• to convince national research institution to support them.

This first ANAEE Workshop was only the first step of the ANAEE Design Study Project in the aim to identify the potential partners and already existing infrastructure. The discussions we had during these three days in Paris have been a good start, but we have to continue them before to be able to propose a clear view of both common scientific objectives and common integrated research infrastructures necessary to built for facing them.

The objective of the ANAEE Design Study is not only to convince individual researchers on the necessity and interest of developing new integrated infrastructure, but also to convince a sufficiently large consortium of national research entities and agencies to support actively this initiative…that is more difficult. For that we ask you to fill the small questionnaire. Template