LTER-Europe is a network of national networks established in 2007 through a merger of existing smaller regional and new national LTER networks in Europe. It represents the European contribution to the global International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER); 16 of the 44 ILTER members belong to LTER-Europe. While for the first two decades of its existence the LTER program built on natural sciences, the emerging LTER-Europe Network engaged in the ongoing re-design of the LTER program to expand its scope to the human/social dimension with a recognition that strongly coupled and integrated socio-ecological systems are driven by economic, political, cultural and environmental forces. The investigation of these forces requires a new generation of socio-economic and ecological research (LTSER) paradigms with appropriate infrastructure. Whereas the LTER Sites form the in-situ component for the research on ecosystem functioning and their development, the LTSER Platforms support the exemplary research of socio-ecological systems, covering the entire feedback loop between external and internal drivers, their impacts on ecosystem structures and functions, the effects of altered ecosystem services on society and alternative conservation and resource management practices.
In addition, LTER-Europe is a heterogeneous network of research infrastructures: institutions involved in ecological research across the continent, researchers in natural and social sciences including economics, scientific site coordinators and research platform managers, long-term monitoring sites with associated data legacies, research projects with varying practices and procedures for data management, a number of different disciplinary and national data policies as well as fragmented and uneven funding with the national networks. Therefore, a major challenge for information management in LTER-Europe results from the distributed and heterogeneous nature of its infrastructure and data.
LTER-Europe Network attempts to facilitate new kind of research and therefore needs the support of an information management framework that allows sharing and use of data from socio-ecological monitoring and research. With the end of funding from ALTER-Net (a five-year European Union Network of Excellence project), an Information Management Expert Panel (IM EP) was formed in the Mallorca meeting (December 2008) of information management experts and research scientists to guide the development of information technology and infrastructure development for the network. The IM EP recognised yet another great challenge: the social and technological readiness for participation in information management varies significantly at all levels in LTER-Europe.
Therefore a holistic approach to information management in LTER-Europe was outlined; taking into account:
socio-technical infrastructure perspective - addressing not only technological tools but also social arrangements
long-term perspective – accounting for data administration, infrastructure development and maintenance
continuous development approach - infrastructure development is an incremental and iterative process including implementation and enactment to be adopted as broadly as possible within LTER-Europe.
bottom-up approach – fostering site-based information management within the network
multi-level perspective – dealing with all organisational levels of the LTER program from the site, platform, national network, regional network to the global level

A combination of bottom-up (sites and platforms) and top-down approaches (policies, strategies and frameworks) is needed to deal with the challenges of information management for LTER-Europe Network together with keeping in mind one of the important lessons learned from ALTER-Net, that is information management cannot be considered in isolation from the needs of the research scientists.