This document reflects the commitment of the eLTER community to produce a high-levelstrategy document that presents the essence, spirit, and uniqueness of the eLTER RI.From September 2020 to May 2021, the collective efforts of the Strategic Planning team hasbeen devoted to crystallizing our objectives, defining our raison d'être, and finding expressionfor our core values. In other words, we are defining where we want to go and how to get there,and for whom. To these ends, we collected existing material and synthesized the many inputsfrom internal and external stakeholders. Specific brainstorming sessions to collect input fromthe eLTER community were organized during two main project meetings of eLTER PPP andeLTER PLUS. The consensually-agreed upon goal was to prepare a synthetic document thatwould be understandable by a broad audience of diverse stakeholders.