Service : Terrestrial Metatron Service : Terrestrial Metatron

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General Informations
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Terrestrial Metatron

Semi-controlled environments to study climate change and habitat fragmentation
biodiversity sciences climate change fragmentation wetland ecosystem

Provider

Institution/Organisation

CNRS

Website

Installation

SETE Moulis - Terrestrial Metatron

About Service

An ecotron, located on the Commune of Caumont in Ariège (France), dedicated to the study of ecological and evolutionary processes inside semi-controlled environments. It comprises 48 mesocosms, each with a surface of 100-m² and a height of 2-m, each acting as a small ecosystem, with natural and diverse vegetation and insect communities and a relatively wide variety of thermal microhabitats (shaded, dense vegetation, sun-battered rocks and logs, and ponds). In each mesocoms, we can monitor and manipulate climatic conditions (temperature, humidity or solar radiation) with automatic motor-driven shutters and sprinklers. Species movements among units can further be manipulated with corridors between mesocoms which can be open or not to allow species to freely disperse from one unit to another. This apparatus is used to study the effects of climate and fragmentation on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of ecological systems.


Specific informations

The unit of access is an enclosure.month and the access will be charged based on actual costs. It includes the allocation of a certain number of enclosures/corridors, the setting-up and maintenance of instruments, a mowing in enclosures/corridors if requested and a training to use instruments. Users must involve the scientific and technical managers in the building of the project in order to estimate the feasibility of the project and submit their project for the year y before November 30th of y-1. The hosted projects usually use between 4 and 16 enclosures for 2 to 8 months. Users will also commit to respecting the platform access charter and the data policy as governed by the AnaEE France national infrastructure, in particular by depositing project metadata and data in dedicated information systems and by committing to respecting the rules for valorization and publication of results.
Services currently offered by the infrastructure: 10 to 24 enclosures are potentially available for new projects depending on the success of currently submitted grants. The remaining, already used, 24 enclosures can host additional sampling and observations related to the ongoing hosted project about climate warming.

Classification

Scientific domain

  • Biological & Medical Sciences
  • Natural Sciences

Scientific SubDomain

  • Earth & Related Environmental Sciences
Access
Target Users :
Research Communities
Access Type :
Physical
Access Mode :
Paid
Resources
Contacts

Olivier Guillaume -

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If you are interested in using our service, please send us a proposal for a project