The current preparatory phase is developing the LifeWatch Masterplan containing information about the construction process and organization process. The Masterplan will be published later. Complementary to the LifeWatch Masterplan, the LifeWatch Construction Database offers information on the Construction Projects, the Construction Components and the Construction Issues defining the LifeWatch European Research Infrastructure. The LifeWatch Construction Database provides a specification of all products and activities necessary to construct the infrastructure and start the initial operations.

LifeWatch is an e-Science infrastructure that serves to explore, describe and understand patterns in biodiversity and the processes that maintain biodiversity in space and time at the gene, species, and ecosystem (landscape) level.

The objective of LifeWatch is to establish a European research infrastructure on biodiversity and ecosystem research to facilitate new frontiers in research concerning evolutionary, genetic, ecological, landscape and conservation aspects of biodiversity. Key elements of the infrastructure will consist of distributed observatories/sensors, interoperable databases, processing and analytical tools, computational capability, and computational capacity. LifeWatch will most of all be an analysis platform.

Analytical platform

The innovative LifeWatch design offers integrated access to large-scale external data resources, advanced algorithms and computational capability through a service-oriented architecture to support knowledge development on biodiversity from the genetic level to ecosystems and landscapes. Data mining, data analysis and modeling allows users to study patterns and mechanisms across different levels of biodiversity. The LifeWatch infrastructure provides scientific research teams with new collaborative environments by creating ‘e-Laboratories' or composing ‘e-Services'. Through workflows, templates can be made that integrate data transformations, different types of data analyses, and reporting. These workflows hold the complete methodological approaches of a research project, and can be used by others. This enables easy replication, and avoids doubling of work by each scientist. Furthermore data and analytical and modeling algorithms can be shared with others, while controlling access. If required, fast computational capacity can be accessible through distributed high performance computer facilities. LifeWatch enables "distributed large scale" and collaborative research on complex and multidisciplinary problems.
Additional background information on the LifeWatch project can be found here.

Open access

LifeWatch will be an open access research infrastructure, offering a single portal for users from the scientific community, as well as policy makers and representatives of the private sector.