Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)

As part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), TERN is an overarching and integrated network designed to serve ecosystem research in Australia.

Central to TERN is the leading edge capacity to measure, search, retrieve, integrate and analyse a range of data sets that are continually growing, along with assessing the expertise of the people who produced them.

TERN provides the resources to connect researchers and enable data to be stored appropriately, efficiently discovered and retrieved and used appropriately.

Key facts

  • State: QLD
  • Lead institute: University of Queensland
  • Project status: In progress
  • Australian Government contribution:
  • $20 million from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy program
  • $25.6 million under the Super Science Initiative
  • $3.1 million under the Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (CRIS)
  • $8,173,500 from National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy 2013 program

Project deliverables

TERN builds on significant past investments by scientists and governments to understand Australian ecosystems. It does this by focussing on collating, calibrating, validating and standardising existing data sets.

TERN is also:

•funding new research infrastructure and collection systems

•expanding observation and monitoring programs into unrepresented ecosystems

•building digital infrastructure to store and publish this information in a form that can be searched and accessed freely under licenses that acknowledge the data providers and build collaborative research.

Facilities and sites

TERN is managed and coordinated by the TERN Office, hosted by the University of Queensland in Brisbane. In addition, there are 12 TERN Facilities, each which works in one or more ecosystem science domains.

These Facilities currently have over 1100 monitoring sites around Australia, a figure which is expected to grow to over 10,000 as sites are developed and state-based partners join TERN and share their infrastructure.

Access

TERN data is freely available to all. For more information, visit the TERN website.

Participating organisations

Universities

•University of Queensland (lead agency)

•Australian National University

•Charles Darwin University

•Curtin University

•Griffith university

•James Cook University

•La Trobe University

•Macquarie University

•Monash University

•Queensland University of Technology

•RMIT University

•The University of Adelaide

•The University of Melbourne

•The University of Queensland

•The University of Sydney

•The University of Tasmania

Government

•Bureau of Agriculture and Resources Economics and Sciences

•Bureau of Meteorology

•ANDS (Australian National Data Service)

•AusGoal (Australian Government Open Access and Learning Framework)

•CRC for Forestry

•CSIRO (various divisions)

•WA Department of Agriculture and Food

•SA Department of Environment and Conservation

•Forestry Tasmania

•Geoscience Australia

•NCI (National Computational Infrastructure)

•NSW Office of Environment and Heritage

•NT Government

•SA Department of Environment and Natural Resources