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What is BRC4Env

The Biological Resource Centre for the Environment, BRC4Env (https://doi.org/10.15454/TRBJTB) is a distributed infrastructure for research leaded by the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE). It aims to provide a strategic delivery for excellent and large-scale environmental and agricultural science in Europe. BRC4Env supports both fundamental and applied research based on agro-environmental bioresources. These biological and/or genomic resources are sampled from soils, sediments, waters, agricultural and forest ecosystems... and preserved in organized collections. They can include microbial (communities), animal and plant resources. BRC4Env makes these resources available for researchers from academia, but also industry, technology and additional sectors.

BRC4Env is one pilar of AgroBRC-RARe, the French Research Infrastructure "Agricultural Resources for Research".

BRC4Env is currently being set up (implementation/construction). Some BRC4Env services are still available for researchers. BRC4Env builds on existing facilities, equipment and human capital of biological platforms and laboratories in France. The vision of BRC4Env is the long-term collaboration and common development of strategies, best practices and standards related to the use of environmental resources for basic and applied research in the field of environment and agronomy.

Goals and Objectives

BRC4Env aims to:

• Become a major European provider of environmental research facilities, resources and services.
• Secure the long-term maintenance and strategic development of the infrastructures to support top-level research in environmental and agricultural research and their applications.
• Provide co-ordination and leadership through a strong management structure, joint development activities, scientific meetings and workshops.
• Ensure standardisation of data collection, storage and transmission, workflows, and protocols along with implementation of best practice in research methodologies and technologies.

Organization

The Biological Resource Centre for the Environment (BRC4Env) is a French distributed infrastructure involving many academic parteners, whose headquarter for coordination is in ECOSYS Department, INRAE Versailles, France.

Governance

The BRC4Env governance will stand on a Steering Committee (SC) which will work with a Scientific Strategic Commitee and a Stakeholder Strategic Committee. The SC will watch the steps in the amelioration and the reinforcement of BRCs network and it will examine the application of new BRCs in order to spread the network.

Timeline

BRC4Env is being set up since early 2015. Many collections are available to the research community.

Policy and Strategic Landscape

Research infrastructures play an increasingly important role for the advancement of knowledge and technology in Europe and worldwide. The term research infrastructure refers to facilities, services and resources that are used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research. Research infrastructures bring together the suitable conditions and critical mass to enable cutting edge, large-scale research.

Services of the Biological Ressource Centre for the Environment (BRC4Env) are recognized as top-level services and benefit of French labels ("Commission Nationale des Outils Collectifs" of INRAE, Infrastructures in Biology Health and Agriculture-Ibisa: http://www.ibisa.net/, Investments for the Future-Investissements d’Avenir program), or are involved in European infrastructures.

Quality management

The services have developed a quality management (best-practices) according to French (i.e. INRAE, NF S 96-900) or international (i.e. ISO 9001:2015) frameworks, including privacy policy about the data collected. They follow the rules of good scientific and ethical practices.

Several services benefit of a French approval of quarantine facilities, for handling and experiments on soils and organisms from non-continental European territories and non-European countries.

Collaborations

BRC4Env has started to build connections and collaborations with several ongoing initiatives, projects and sister research infrastructures. In the coming years, BRC4Env seeks to intensify existing collaborations, broaden its network, and to build new partnerships in Europe.