R/V Aranda © Panu Hänninen
SYKE maintains and develops many national infrastructures, which serve research either directly or indirectly. Infrastructures covering the whole chain of environmental data management from observations to dissemination serve many purposes from monitoring, research, pollution control to environmental impact assessment. SYKE is responsible for designing several national environmental monitoring programmes, particularly monitoring regarding water quantity and quality, but also many terrestrial ones. For data quality management SYKE Laboratory Services play a central role as a national calibration laboratory for aquatic chemistry.
Of the specific research infrastructures our flagship is FINMARI, the national marine research infrastructure coordinated by SYKE. All Finnish research institutes and universities active in marine research are partners in FINMARI. FINMARI has close collaboration with other European marine RIs aiming at the ESFRI Roadmap. A prominent part of FINMARI is the R/V Aranda, which just was thoroughly renovated.
SYKE is also partner in two other national research infrastructures which are included in the national RI Roadmap: Geoportti – The Hub for Finnish Geospatial Research and Education Resources and the Finnish Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research network FinLTSER.
National environmental registers and databases can be seen as one big data infrastructure These have been and will be in the coming years under major development and re-structuring in order to be able to respond to future needs. The open data policy adopted already in 2008 in SYKE together with the national research strategy provide the guiding principles for development.
To improve the accessibility of environmental information two recently launched portals should be mentioned: MarineFinland.fi provides access to marine data and information produced by practically all organizations in the field and via vesi.fi (so far only in Finnish) portal one has access to information on freshwater resources, both quantity and quality.
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