Until 13 February 2022, researchers from industry and academia can apply for free access to top-class marine research infrastructures, thanks to the opening of the ninth call of the ASSEMBLE Plus project (Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories Expanded).  ASSEMBLE Plus offers access to over 32 marine stations and institutes in 13 countries across Europe and overseas for basic and applied research in the marine science field (see overleaf). Researchers from both industry and academia can apply for on-site and remote access. Sponsorship includes travel and subsistence for two persons (one return trip per person, up to 30 days). Successful...

The University of Salento (Puglia, Italy) has published a number of calls for applications for research grants, in association with LifeWatchPLUS and LifeWatch Italy. These include: “Development of geospatial models supporting web services for the study of biodiversity and ecosystem change scenarios” (21/01/22)"Semantic technologies for biodiversity and ecosystem research to support the LifeWatchPLUS distributed Data Centre and the LifeWatch ERIC community” (16/01/22)“Multimedia developments for biodiversity and ecosystem research” (21/01/22) Please see the LifeWatch Italy Jobs page for more information. To see opportunities available with LifeWatch ERIC, click here.

Starting in February 2022, EOSC Future (one of the projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is currently involved) will organise ‘ask me anything’ webinars. On the first Tuesday of every month, participants will have the chance to ask questions about a variety of EOSC services and resources. During these exclusive Q&A sessions, resources and resource categories available on the EOSC platform will be presented, discussed and, in some cases, tested out. Each session will take place online from 14.00-15.00 CET.  The first 3 webinars are listed below: 01/02/2022: Data storage01/03/2022: Software 05/04/2022: Compute services Have a question about another EOSC service that is not listed above? More dates and...

On Friday, 17 December, LifeWatch ERIC CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda gave a presentation at the EU - Russian Federation Symposium on Research Infrastructures (RIs). The virtual symposium brought together delegates from Russian and European RIs, active in various scientific domains, to raise awareness of the broad array of scientific opportunities offered to scientists and for RI cooperation in Europe and in the Russian Federation. In his presentation, “Fostering EU-Russian Federation e-Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Sustainable Services provision and Conservation Mechanisms, Together” which he gave on behalf of the LifeWatch ERIC Executive Board, Dr González-Aranda suggested reinforcing existing communities-of-practice between the blocs,...

 Αfter a two-year-long process of hard and meticulous work by a great number of scientists and ESFRI delegates, a new ESFRI Roadmap was published on 7 December 2021. ESFRI presented the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap on Large Scale Research Infrastructures during a half-day online conference, which you can watch here. For more information, please visit the Launch Event webpage. The ESFRI Roadmap contains probably the best European science facilities based on a thorough evaluation and selection procedure. It combines ESFRI Projects, which are new research infrastructures in progress towards implementation, and ESFRI Landmarks, successfully implemented Research Infrastructures. The document also describes the broader Landscape of research in Europe...

On 8–9 December 2021, AERAP Science (the Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Platform) hosted the round-table session "A preview on the Role of Science at the EU-Africa Summit 2022", to consider the contribution of science to the priorities for the EU-Africa Summit on 17–18 February 2022 in Brussels. In his contribution, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO and ERIC Forum Executive Board Member, addressed the necessity of establishing an EU-AFRICA e-Biodiversity network, in order to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals regarding the sustainable provision of ecosystem services. For more information on this event, please see the AERAP article. Full participant list: Orla Feely – Vice President...

Yesterday, during the second day of the 2021 World Space Forum "Space4Climate Action" organised by UNOOSA (the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, presented "Towards the establishment of a global e-Biodiversity network for Sustainable Development Goal accomplishment and Ecosystem Services provision". Dr González-Aranda highlighted that humanity is bringing our life support system, the biosphere, to the point of collapse, proposing that to solve this situation we must deepen our current level of knowledge, move beyond the present fragmentation of science, and foster greater complementarity and synergy between disciplines. One of the ways to do this being the...

The Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) is working on the enhancement of the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure (LWGreece RI) Data Services. The purpose of these activities is to provide end-users with a user-friendly service, enabling them to search and access (meta)data from two sources, Micro-CT vLab and IPT MedOBIS. The activities are divided into three major categories: (a) design and implementation of facilities for harvesting data (b) data modelling and semantic data transformation activities, and (c) updates and enhancements of the Data Services of the LWGreece RI. More details of these activities are given below: A set of supporting services and tools have been...

The Micro-CT vLab is a virtual laboratory which is hosted in the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) and was initially established during the ESFRI LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure. This virtual lab offers users access to virtual galleries of various samples which can be displayed and downloaded through a web application. This tool has been updated over the Elixir-GR, BIOIMAGING-GR and Synthesys+ projects with the addition of several new features. Firstly, the Micro-CT vLab has now been upgraded to Drupal version 9. A series of micro-CT datasets from medical to biological studies can be uploaded in order to be stored and disseminated. Furthermore, the Micro-CT vLab...

On 23–24 November 2021, LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, travelled to the Ionian University in Zakynthos (Greece) to deliver three lectures to Bachelor’s degree students at the University’s Department of the Environment. Dr Arvanitidis gave three in-person lectures; the first presented the research infrastructure LifeWatch ERIC and its unique position at the service of the biodiversity and ecosystem research community, the second covered examples on the international, European and national legal framework of the sea, whilst the third demonstrated  how LifeWatch ERIC can help scientists working on lagoonal biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics. Dr Arvanitidis himself is a marine scientist and Research Director at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, where he helped to form the national...

On Thursday 19 November, LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, delivered a keynote speech a the Adaptamed Symposium in Málaga, which marked the end of the LIFE Adaptamed project. His speeh was entitled "LifeWatch ERIC in a nutshell", and showed the main goals and e-services provided by LifeWatch ERIC in the context of the ENVRI cluster. The presentation took place during the session named “New technologies for monitoring – ecosystem management and visualisation” together with Dr Regino Zamora, Professor of Ecology from Granada University, Dr Antonio Ortiz, from the Water and Environment Agency of Junta de Andalusia (AMAYA), chaired by Dr Francisco-Javier Cano-Manuel, Chief of the Environmental...

Inspirational Event 2021, powered by Advance Services, took place at Heraklion (Crete) on 15 and 16 November. Its purpose was to bring together successful and distinguished professionals to give half-hour talks, passing on their knowledge, experiences and advice to an audience consisting of executives and entrepreneurs of the local community. Alongside LifeWatch ERIC Executive Board members, Dr Juan Miguel Gonzalez-Aranda (LifeWatch ERIC CTO & Head of its ICT-Core) and Dr Christos Arvanitidis (LifeWatch ERIC CEO), spoke Dr George Bruseker (Takin Solutions CEO), Dr George Caridakis (Professor at the Aegean University), Mr Yannis Lidakis (Harvard University Representative & SkyExpress Commercial Director) and Dr Armando Stellato (Professor at the University of Rome). The event was chaired by Nikos Minadakis, CEO of Advance Services, which provides Technical & Operations Consultancy to LifeWatch ERIC....

The Catalogue of Life (COL) is the result of international collaboration, providing researchers, policymakers, environmental managers, and the wider public with a consistent and up-to-date index of the names of all the world’s known species. COL originated in 2001 as a partnership between the organisations Species 2000 and the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), and is now curated by an international community of 165 taxonomic data sources. In 2021, the COL turned 20, and with the release of the 2021 Annual Checklist (Bánki et al. 2021, July, 2021), has reached just over 2 million accepted species names. Over the past years LifeWatch Belgium, as part...

In recent years, fish tracking technology has revolutionised our knowledge on fish migration and behaviour. The LifeWatch initiative, the European Tracking Network (ETN), integrates the European efforts of hundreds of users, dealing with thousands of tagged fish from a multitude of species. It is powered by LifeWatch Belgium through VLIZ and INBO, and supported by numerous partners throughout Europe. These combined efforts have culminated in a striking milestone: 500 million detections have been reached, imparting invaluable information on fish species such as the Atlantic bluefin tuna, European seabass and sturgeon. There is a large and growing number of researchers using biotelemetry to study...

The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, including information on synonymy. This register, which is hosted by VLIZ, a member of LifeWatch Belgium, has received endorsement by the Ocean Decade as a 'Project Action'. In early October 2021, the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (‘Ocean Decade’), endorsed 94 new Decade Actions across all ocean basins, all of them contributing in some way to the central vision of “the science we need for the ocean we want”. Earlier in 2021, the WoRMS Steering Committee and the...