News

Estonian universities are launching five new centers of excellence in research. Archimedes Foundation has chosen the projects, which will be given between 1.5 and 3.1 million euros apiece from among 17 applications it received. Center for Excellence in Research on Adjusting to Environmental Change (ENVIRON) was one of the winners. 

The ENVIRON center of excellence based at the University of Life Sciences in Tartu is embarking on a four-year mission to study how well ecosystems deal with environmental stress.

«Today we are seeing extensive changes in the climate of our planet, with carbon dioxide concentrations in the air increasing, temperature and water patterns changing.  Land use has also changed rapidly and the concentrations of many hazardous pollutants have escalated, which, in its turn, may affect the development of living organisms and cause a rapid spread of aggressive plant pathogens», said the Head of the Centre Professor Ülo Niinemets.

«Ecosystems have a capacity to adapt to the changes in the environment. World biota can change to speed of global changes. In order to understand the challenges before us within the next couple of decades and in the long run it is important to study the adaptive capacity of ecosystems to climate changes and their enhancement. Unfortunately, the models used to assess the vulnerability of the global climate change have proved insufficient from the adaptation capacity point of view».

The interdisciplinary center, funded by the Archimedes Foundation, draws on five leading research groups from the University of Life Sciences, the University of Tartu and the Tallinn University of Technology.
Forty researchers and thirty 30 PhD students are aboard on this project at present. The consortium will carry out interdisciplinary, experimental and model-based research that allows quantitative prediction of the effect of ecosystems on global changes.

The project will last until the end of 2015. The total funding is over 3.2 million euros, 95 percent of which is channeled from the European Regional Development Fund through Archimedes.