is a Ontology.
EnvThes (Environmental Thesaurus) is the controlled vocabulary of the European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI), published as a SKOS thesaurus. It provides harmonised terms for describing observations and measurements of ecosystem processes, including parameters, methods, variables and research topics, and supplies common keywords for annotating and querying metadata in DEIMS-SDR. Concepts carry multilingual labels and links to matching concepts in thesauri such as GEMET, EUROVOC and AGROVOC and in ENVO. The vocabulary is coordinated by Umweltbundesamt GmbH (Austria), maintained as a spreadsheet that is converted to RDF on GitHub, and served through a Skosmos browser.
| ID | Name | URL | Category | Format | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| envthes.skosmos | EnvThes Skosmos Browser | en | Graphical Interface | http | Skosmos browser for EnvThes with alph... |
| envthes.api ⚠ | EnvThes Skosmos REST API | EnvThes | Programming Interface | http | Skosmos REST API for EnvThes, with en... |
| envthes.ttl | EnvThes Turtle | EnvThes.ttl (3.0 MB) | Ontology | ttl | Full EnvThes SKOS thesaurus in Turtle... |
| envthes.csv | EnvThes CSV | EnvThes.csv (2.3 MB) | Product | csv | CSV export of the EnvThes source spre... |
| envthes.xlsx | EnvThes Spreadsheet | EnvThes.xlsx (4.6 MB) | Product | xlsx | EnvThes source spreadsheet, fetched f... |
EnvThes (Environmental Thesaurus) is the controlled vocabulary of the eLTER Research Infrastructure for long-term ecological research, monitoring and experiments. Development began in 2013 within the EnvEurope and ExpeER projects, originally using PoolParty, and the thesaurus now holds about 5,600 SKOS concepts (about 2,900 of them deprecated), at version 5.0.16 as of 2026-10-05. It is coordinated by Umweltbundesamt GmbH (Austria).
EnvThes drew on existing vocabularies such as the US LTER controlled vocabulary, the EUNIS habitat list, Catalogue of Life and NASA units, and links its concepts to matching terms in GEMET, EUROVOC, AGROVOC and ENVO. It provides the shared keywords used by DEIMS-SDR to annotate site and dataset metadata.
envthes returns 404.The vocabulary is released under CC BY 4.0.
Created: October 05, 2026 | Last modified: October 05, 2026