The creation of the SILA Network (meaning climate in Inuktitut), a northern network of climate and environmental observatories, was made possible in part by the Programme d'appui au financement d'infrastructures of the Ministère de la RechercheScience et de la Technologie du Québec.
The general objective of the network is to characterize, quantify and evaluate environmental change in eight bioclimatic zones distributed across Northern Quebec and the eastern Canadian Arctic. The SILA Network comprises 100 automated stations acquiring data on a variety of environmental variables. The eight sites have been chosen based on the environmental issues of each of the bioclimatic zones. These sites aredistributed along a North-South transect, from the Boreal forest to the High Arctic. In each region, these experimental and instrumental sites represent a reference site for a wide variety of research programs.