Weather & climate tutorial - learn about weather and climate change
Fixed point photo archive - fixed point photos visually recording change at selected sites
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.
Environmental data
Access over two decades of detailed environmental data (1993-2015) plus other site-specific datasets.
Long-term monitoring sites
ECN comprises 11 terrestrial sites in a range of habitats. Detailed data are also collected from rivers, streams and sites across the UK. Some sites make excellent locations for environmental research, benefiting from our long time series datasets.
Published environmental research
Explore our extensive catalogue of publications detailing research using ECN data and/or sites.
Water quality: Dissolved Organic Carbon
Studies at ECN Moor House are improving our understanding of the factors controlling long-term changes in carbon fluxes from peatlands.
Plant diversity: What affects plant species richness?
Our long-term vegetation surveying enables us to explore factors affecting change in plant species richness.
Insect decline: Ground beetles
Scientists have used ECN survey data to explore the decline in many ground beetle species.
Assessing Alice Holt's bird populations
Two approaches are being used at Alice Holt forest in southern England to gather data on bird populations, 15 years on from the last Common Bird Census carried out there. [Photo: Phil Robson]
ECN at 'Your Planet, Your Future' careers showcase, Edinburgh
ECN will be featured at the 'Your Planet, Your Future' school careers fair at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh, this week.
3rd ILTER Open Science Meeting
The 3rd International Long Term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) Open Science Meeting will take place in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China from 14-19 October 2024.
Featured publication
This 2024 paper describes the creation of a prototype digital twin (pDT) for cultural ecosystem services. The authors used data from a range of sources, including from GBIF and eLTER (including ECN data for the Cairngorms site).
Featured site
Cairngorms: This high altitude site lies on the western flank of the Cairngorms, Scotland, in a National Nature Reserve.
ECN Publications Library
We provide an extensive library of publications that use ECN data and/or ECN sites.
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.