Clouds. Sam Schooler, unsplash.com
UK Environmental Change Network

Monitoring, data and research to understand environmental change since 1993

We are the UK's long-term ecosystem monitoring and research programme. We've been making regular measurements of air, soil, water, animals and plants across a network of sites for 30 years. Our free data and instrumented research sites support science to determine how and why the natural environment is changing.

Resources supporting environmental research and education

Weather & climate tutorial - learn about weather and climate change
Rothamsted 6 December 2023   Cairngorms 2 November 2023   Wytham 29 November 2023   Moor House (Troutbeck) 8 November 2023
Fixed point photo archive - fixed point photos visually recording change at selected sites

Themes we are relevant to

Latest

Features

About us

ECN is a UK-based multi-agency programme with funding and monitoring from a consortium of UK government departments and agencies. The network is coordinated by staff at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH). UKCEH manage the data generated by the programme, which are stored in a central database and are made available for research and education.

Our monitoring supports scientific research addressing a range of environmental issues concerning the interacting effects of pressures from air pollution, climate change and land use change. The features above ('themes') describe specific environmental research supported by ECN long-term datasets and form our Why the research matters series.

The UKCEH component of ECN (i.e. network coordination and UKCEH site monitoring) is National Capability, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council via UKCEH's UK-SCAPE National Capability Programme.

Learn more about what we do
We are developing new content on our website to replace features previously on our Data Centre website. We have transferred some content to this website and we've created a new Publications Library. We are also working on a replacement for the time series viewer, allowing us to display interactive graphs of summary ECN data. These developments may take some time and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.