Integrated Experimental Research Infrastructures: A Paradigm Shift to Face an Uncertain World and Innovate for Societal Benefit

A wide range of biotic and physical processes link the biosphere to the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Despite this link, our understanding of the biosphere does not match our increasingly sophisticated understanding of Earth’s physical and biogeochemical dynamics at the regional, continental, and global scales. Used in combination, these two types of experimental design can provide inferences that can span large time and space scales, and is the core rationale for many experimental research infrastructures. Everyone recognizes the need to model our understanding of the system behavior that is elucidated by experiments. A distributed model to collect experimental data from the field or ex situ chambers across countries to be used centrally is a difficult proposition. The knowledge and new understanding are derived from transforming raw data into higher-order data products, whether they be statistical analyses, mechanistic models, used in Bayesian data assimilation for ecological forecasting.