Interacting ecosystem processes are of different types and take place at different time and space scales. Thereby ExpeER integrates complementary types of infrastructures allowing the investigation of these different processes.

Since we aim at a mechanistic understanding of current and future ecosystem changes, experimental approaches allowing simulation of the major forcing variables (climate, land use, biodiversity) are a major part of ExpeER. They are developed both in Ecotrons and in Highly Instrumented Experimental in situ Sites.

Since we also need to analyze the effects of various mixes of natural and anthropogenic drivers in the long term, the second large part of ExpeER are the Highly Instrumented Observational Sites.

Our understanding of processes needs also the access to the most relevant ecosystem variables, some of them accessible only through state-of-the-art Analytical Platforms. The integration of these different experimental and observational approaches will be done by developing Modeling Platforms associated with Data Bases.

Each of these sites and platforms is pooling resources and offering them to a large scientific community, beyond local users. The Transnational Access program of ExpeER in particular will fund access to these sites and platforms.