A spin-off born inside one of Europe's largest ecotron facilities.
Ecotron Solutions grew out of Hasselt University's Centre for Environmental Sciences and the UHasselt Ecotron in the Hoge Kempen National Park. We carry that scientific and technical experience into a small, focused company that supports other teams working in the controlled-environment niche.
Where we come from
Ecotron Solutions is a spin-off from the Centre for Environmental Sciences (CMK) at Hasselt University, in Belgium. Our team grew up around the UHasselt Ecotron in the Hoge Kempen National Park, an infrastructure of twelve closed sun-lit units that is one of the largest facilities of its kind in Europe.
What we learned there
For more than a decade, colleagues at CMK have designed climate scenarios, run multi-year ecosystem experiments, and kept sensors, control systems and data pipelines running day and night. That hands-on experience, across plant and soil science, atmospheric physics, instrumentation and scientific software, is the foundation we build on.
Why a spin-off
We created Ecotron Solutions to make that expertise available beyond a single facility. Many teams operating controlled-environment infrastructure face the same recurring questions around climate protocols, fidelity, modelling and analysis, and would benefit from a dedicated partner they can call on without having to rebuild that experience internally.
The UHasselt Ecotron is a large-scale research infrastructure built for sophisticated, state-of-the-art controlled climate experiments. Its twelve closed sun-lit units let researchers separately control air temperature, humidity, CO2, precipitation, and soil water and temperature above intact soil-canopy columns, and monitor ecosystem processes in real time.
Working inside that facility taught us where controlled-environment science tends to be fragile: how climate protocols are constructed, how faithfully a unit can actually reproduce them, how sensor archives should be curated, and how much scientific software is quietly holding an experiment together. Those are the exact questions Ecotron Solutions is built around.
- 12closed sun-lit units, independently controlled
- 3.14 m²lysimeter surface per unit, 1.5 m deep
- 5soil depths x 3 positions monitored per unit
- ICOSlinked to the Mechelse Heide flux tower
Partners, not competitors
We do not run experiments in competition with other ecotron centres or research groups. Our work supports the science that happens inside your facility. You keep ownership of the research questions, the data and the results; we contribute the protocols, tools and analysis behind them.
Confidential by default
Everything we touch, from experimental designs to sensor archives and model code, is treated as confidential. We work under non-disclosure agreements as a matter of course, and we do not reuse a partner's material to support another partner's project.
Rooted in a scientific culture
Our reflexes come from a research environment where methods are documented, uncertainty is quantified, and every claim has to be defensible. That is the standard we bring to a protocol, a model, a piece of software, or a written analysis you hand to a reviewer.
We are a small team of scientists and engineers, shaped by years inside one of Europe's largest ecotron facilities, now helping other teams get more out of theirs.