Climate change, increase in landuse, and other global changes create unprecented deterioations in ecosystem structure and functions that lead to loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services,; thus well-structured and planned long-term ecological monitoring programmes are indispensable for providing a more holistic understanding of the changes predicting those changes and achieving sustainable development goals. However, most ecological monitoring research are limited to the duration of financial support received by the projects. Long-term ecological monitoring studies are very important for better understanding of ecological changes.

Despite the very high rich ecosystem, species and genetic diversity of our country, long term ecological programme is almost none existing with a few exceptions. It is foreseen that the global impact of climate change will have a significant negative impact on the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and the related economic sectors in the Mediterranean climate. Considering the economic importance of these ecosystem services and products, it is very critical to have long term ecological monitoring programmes for developing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies Thus, there is an urgent need for initiating a network of number of long-term ecological monitoring (LTER) activities in Turkey covering freshwaters to steppes and forest ecosystems.

The First Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network began in 1980s in the United States with the funding of the National Science Foundation. "LTER-Europe; European Long Term Ecological Research" Network is an umbrella network established in 2003 for long-term ecosystem research in Europe. This network provides information on the nature and function of different terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with long-term monitoring research and the long-term environmental, social and economic responses of ecosystems. Currently, networks of 24 countries in Europe are part of it. LTER-Europe has expanded with the support of the EU framework and Horizon 2020 funds, and as of 2018 LTER-Europe was invited to prepare a European Research Infrastructures Strategic Forum (ESFRI) roadmap. Thus, Europe-LTER has gained the right to become one of the EU's strategic research units. METU, Ecosystem Application and Research Center (EKOSAM) has been invited to the European ESFRI roadmap project as an associate member due to Lakes Mogan-Eymir ecological long-term monitoring and restoration program which has been going on since 1997. Furthermore, EKOSAM as voluntarily secretariat of establishing TR-LTER network organized half a day workshop which hold on 11-12 June 2019. The aim of the workshop was to bring together all the institutions and organizations from different disciplines which are likely to be involved in carrying out ecological monitoring for initiating national long-term ecological monitoring network or can be involved in financial front of such network to function. Through achieving establishment of TR-LTER Network we aim to become and active partner of as a part of one of the most important ecological research program in the world, Europe-LTER.