Newsletter 4: March 2017
Editorial
Welcome to the 2016 CRITEX’s Newsletter! You will find in this issue a report of the main events and achievements of the program in 2016, including a descrpition of each workpackage and interviews of Jean François Soussana from the National Institute for Agricultural Research and Alexandra Arènes, a landscape Architect that is fascinated by the Critical Zone Scientists… Three highly significant events marked the year 2016 for the CRITEX program. The first is the launch of the OZCAR (Observatoire de la Zone Critique : Applications et Recherche) national Research Infrastructure (RI). OZCAR gathers a number of national research networks observing the Earth’s terrestrial surface. It aims at creating a plateform of scientific facilities and of scientific exchange enable our critical zone communities to adress new scientific questions that would be difficult to address without a common RI. The second event is the development of the European CZ research. An ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) proposal, called eLTER, is in preparation associating the Critical Zone and LTER communities in more that 25 European countries. It should be submitted to the European ESFRI Road map in 2018. This will mark an important step in the European construction of Critical Zone and Ecosystem sciences and will give a new dimension to our disciplines. Last but not least, in 2016, Charlotte Le Traon has been appointed on the WP0 devoted to project management. Charlotte has spend almost all her time on finishing the web page of CRITEX that is now on line at https://www.critex.fr/. A big thank you to Charlotte!
2017 will be the end of the first phase of CRITEX (T1), corresponding to the acquisition of the equipments. The second phase (T2) is the operating and maintenance phase of the equipments. We have benefited from an extension of the T1 phase by the ANR, allowing us to be more flexible in the choice of the last instruments to be bought by the program. The T2 phase will give the opportunity to all partners and participants of the program to share Critical Zone questions on specific sites and couple the different approaches and techniques, ranging from geochemistry to geophysics and remote sensing. In June 2017, an important moment of the project will be the mid-term evaluation by an international committee that will visit us. We hope you will enjoy reading this issue of the CRITEX newsletter.
Jérôme Gaillardet
Laurent Longevergne
Charlotte Le Traon