From November 13 to 15, the Autumn Data School was held in Lecce, Italy. It was a three-day workshop organised jointly by EMODnet and LifeWatch ERIC. The workshop brought together researchers from Belgium and the Mediterranean region, including Italy, Greece, Tunisia, and Algeria. The School's primary objective was to facilitate knowledge exchange and promote open and FAIR marine research data management practices. During the event's first two days, the participants engaged in hands-on DATAthon. This involved a deep dive into data management best practices, which included all aspects of the data lifecycle, starting from data collection and ending with data...

LifeWatch ERIC is excited to announce its participation in the British Ecological Society's (BES) Annual Meeting, taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, from December 12-15, 2023. This event will brings together ecologists worldwide to share ideas, establish collaborations, and tackle environmental challenges. The primary focus of the LifeWatch ERIC presence will be to engage with early career researchers interested in the Infrastructure's online tools and services. As the world's oldest ecological society, the BES Annual Meeting is Europe's largest conference dedicated to ecology. In 2022, over 1,500 delegates from more than 50 countries across six continents attended the meeting in...

LifeWatch ERIC, in collaboration with EGI and other ENVRI Research Infrastructures, has organised two sessions in the upcoming European Geosciences Union 2024 (EGU) conference in Vienna from April 14-19, 2024. Call for abstract: tell us how Research Infrastructures helped with your research The first session will bring together researchers in environment and climate to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Researchers come from the atmosphere, marine, biodiversity, ecosystems, and solid earth domains. Besides, it involves data product developers, data scientists, and -engineers. The session aims to share insights and real-world examples of Research Infrastructure that helped research or scientific development projects....

The Horizon Europe DTO-BioFlow project has launched an Open Call offering up to 60,000€ for institutions that manage marine biodiversity data, to invite them to contribute to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO) by making these data available to the public domain through EMODnet Biology, the portal that provides open and free access to interoperable data and data products on temporal and spatial distribution of marine species (angiosperms, benthos, birds, fish, macroalgae, mammals, reptiles, phyto- and zooplankton) from European regional seas. Published officially on Tuesday, October 31st, this single-stage call is open to a wide range of...

On October 2-5, 2023, Marine SABRES partners met in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, for their second General Assembly, one year after the kick-off meeting in Cork, Ireland. Members from each of our 21 partner organisations met together at Hafrannsóknastofnun, the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland (MFRI), for three days of productive discussions on the research activities partners have accomplished so far and tasks yet to come. LifeWatch ERIC joined the meeting with the participation of Cristina Huertas-Olivares (International Initiatives & Projects Manager at LifeWatch ERIC SSO, Seville, Spain), and its LifeWatching WebTV LifeWatching WebTV joined the Marine SABRES 2nd General...

In the context of the SmartEcoMountains project, which aims to create a Thematic Centre to expand the knowledge on the functioning of Sierra Nevada ecosystems in global change scenarios, LifeWatch ERIC held a meeting with LALINET (Latin American Lidar NETwork) and ACTRIS (Aerosols, Clouds, and Trace gases Research Infrastructure Network) to foster collaboration in the future. The meeting took place in Granada from October 17 to 20, to exchange and transfer knowledge to identify future collaborative opportunities among these three entities. Researchers from various Latin American countries, including Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil, attended the meeting to collaborate and design joint actions to understand better Earth-Atmosphere...

Ocean Census has announced a new collaboration with the World Register of Marine Species, a major partner in LifeWatch Belgium, to accelerate the discovery of ocean life.

Funded through the EC Horizon Europe Programme and coordinated by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), DTO-BioFlow aims at incorporating previously unavailable or difficult-to-access marine-biodiversity data into the biodiversity component of the EU Digital Twin Ocean, ensuring sustainable data flows for marine biodiversity research. When it comes to observing, mapping, and monitoring biodiversity in maritime ecosystems, marine habitats present specific and one-of-a-kind issues. In spite of the fact that significant advancement has been made in Europe to collect, harmonise, and make available data on marine biodiversity, particularly as a result of the efforts of European research infrastructure (such as EMODnet, Copernicus...

In collaboration with AE4EU, ALL-Ready organised its final event in Brussels on 27 September 2023. The conference was hosted by the Committee of the Regions. Our Agroecology Project Manager, Iria Soto Embodas, presented the All-Ready project in the panel "Practice Perspective: How to put Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures in practice? Q&A". Within the project, one of the deliverables was to produce the Agroecology Virtual Lab, a collaboration platform to standardise collaboration for research and innovation. During the event, the steps to achieve this were presented. The one-day conference highlighted two projects that have laid the foundation for a...

Hosted by LifeWacth ERIC, the Ontoportal Alliance workshop took place in Lecce from September 27 to 29, parallel with the Semantic Academy, the 5-days intensive school designed to boost research with semantic artefacts. The two events overlapped the topic of best practices in managing ontologies and relative data, learning from experts worldwide and sharing knowledge inside the research community. The Ontoportal Alliance workshop included two public sessions: the first focused on the Ontology Development Lifecycle, showing examples of integrating ontology development with the OntoPortal platform. The second session focused on the FAIR-IMPACT EOSC project. The two events were publicly accessible to...

Under the Spanish presidency of the European Union, the high-level conference "Global Dimension and Sustainability of Research Infrastructure" was held on the island of Tenerife on 25-26 September 2023. LifeWatch ERIC Chief Executive Officer Christos Arvanitidis was among the dignitaries present in person, and the events of the two days were all available in streaming.  The event was inaugurated on Monday afternoon by Rafael Rebolo López, Director of the Instituto di Astrofisica de Canarias (which hosted the event); Radka Wildovà, Director General for Higher Education, Science and Research, Czech Republic; Martin Balbackewski, adviser to the vice-president of Wallonia; Ana Arana...

Over twenty researchers from multiple countries, including Algeria, Zimbabwe, Iran, Türkiye, and several European countries, gathered in Lecce this week to participate in the first edition of the "Semantic Academy - Intensive School: Boost your research with semantic artefacts". In addition to the school, there were two workshops for experts in ontologies, providing a platform for the community to share their software knowledge and best practices. The Semantic Academy Intensive School builds on the successful experience of six summer and winter schools. Since 2018, LifeWatch ERIC has co-organised them with ENVRI FAIR and the ENVRI Community on data and service...

On 17th of March, the workshop “Approaches towards findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) zooplankton trait data as stepping stones to improved functional ecology” will take place, organised by Jessica Titocci e Ilaria Rosati, from CNR-IRET and LifeWatch Italy, in collaboration with Dr. Kieran Murphy (ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science), Dr. Brian Hunt (University of British Columbia), Dr. Patrick Pata (University of British Columbia). In the current era of the Anthropocene, both marine and freshwater ecosystems are undergoing significant changes that are disrupting their delicate balance. Zooplankton plays a key role in the trophic dynamics, productivity and functioning of all aquatic ecosystems. As grazers of phytoplankton...

On August 1st, 2023, an interactive online roundtable alongside gender, climate, and health experts to devise gender-responsive climate strategies focusing on health. Africa Zanella, LifeWatch ERIC International Gender Officer, had been invited to share her viewpoint and make her recommendations. As many studies pointed out, climate change disproportionately affects women, girls and marginalised communities, compromising the rights of women and girls and slowing the advancement of gender equality.Growing evidence shows that the climate crisis has an impact on women’s health and their access to health services. Health impacts related to food insecurity, infectious diseases, mental illness, and poor sexual and...

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