The BEeS 2025 Conference began on Monday, 30 June 2025, with a discussion about adopting a Declaration of Intent during the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) “Working Table on Life component of the Biosphere: Complementarities and Synergies”, which was chaired by Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC’s CEO, Peter van Tienderen, LifeWatch ERIC's VLIZ Director and Alberto Basset, LifeWatch ERIC’s Service Center Director. The Declaration of Intent, the Crete Declaration, follows the event’s objective of defining a collaborative roadmap and formalises the intent of the parties involved to collaborate. The closed-door Working Table involved RIs, e-Infrastructures, EU-relevant projects and scientific publishers, all united...

We are thrilled to announce the new release of the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue (https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu), a standard-based information management system based on GeoNetwork 4.2.11. The system is designed and implemented to enable access to several resources from a variety of external providers, represented in the Catalogue as “groups”, through descriptive metadata, enhancing and promoting the information exchange and sharing among organisations and research infrastructures. The Catalogue is operational since 2020: its main goal is to increase collaboration within and among organisations, in order to reduce duplication and enhance information consistency and quality. It also aims to improve the accessibility of...

The MARBEFES project (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services) aims to evaluate and characterise the links between marine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services and the resulting societal goods and benefits in coastal communities. The results of these evaluations feed into easy-to-use tools to help practitioners and policy maximise the ecological value and optimise a sustainable socio-economic use of the marine system for current and future generations.The project members will present and discuss these tools, for biodiversity and ecosystem assessment and measurement, and ecological, social and economic evaluation, during the Autumn School 2025 “Protecting marine biodiversity for nature...

On June 6-8 2025, LifeWatch ERIC and ULPGC-ECOAQUA (University Institute for Research in Sustainable Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems) presented the project Marine SABRES at FIMAR 2025, the Feria Internacional del Mar (International Sea Fair) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, co-organising one of the “Marine SABRES in Fairs” series events. The event, which symbolically ended on World Oceans Day, was a truly inspiring international event, confirming itself as an important event for the blue economy of the Canary Islands and the other archipelagos of Macaronesia: the estimated number of visitors at FIMAR 2025 over the weekend was around 14,000 people...

LifeWatch ERIC actively participated in the in-person WP5 European Agroecology Partnership meeting, “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures”, held at Wageningen University & Research from 18 to 20 June 2025. The meeting, co-organised by WUR and LifeWatch ERIC, brought together key partners to review progress on monitoring and data management strategies for assessing agroecological transitions in Europe. A central focus was on enhancing cross-task collaboration to support the design and implementation of sustainable farming systems across the continent. Hosted at the WUR Impulse Building, the meeting included plenary sessions, cross-task workshops, and a field visit to...

The international workshop “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change” took place on 12–13 June 2025 at MUST Museum in Lecce. The National Biodiversity Future Centre (NBFC), Italy’s first national research and innovation centre for biodiversity, funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through NextGeneration EU funds, organised the workshop in collaboration with LifeWatch ERIC's Working Group on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change. Climate change is deeply altering the living conditions of organisms across the planet, influencing their geographic distribution, abundance, and even the daily cost of survival. These effects are especially severe for species which...

On June 6-8 2025, LifeWatch ERIC and ULPGC-ECOAQUA (University Institute for Research in Sustainable Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems) will co-organise one of the “Marine SABRES in Fairs” series events, at FIMAR 2025, the Feria Internacional del Mar (International Sea Fair). This year's edition of FIMAR focuses on the sustainability of the Canary islands' coastal border: an important event for the nautical and marine-maritime sector of the Canary Islands archipelago organised by the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Port Authority of Las Palmas, Ciudad de Mar Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and...

The North Sea is one of the busiest seas in the world. All this human activity creates a lot of noise underwater, that can have harmful consequences for marine mammals and other organisms. This noise pollution originates primarily through shipping, explosive ordnance disposal, sonar, the construction of wind farms, and sand extraction and dredging. The Marine Environment Service (FPS Public Health) and the Shipping Directorate-General (FPS Mobility), with the support of LifeWatch Belgium (VLIZ), are collaborating on a campaign to raise awareness about underwater noise pollution among the wider public and promote measures, that fortunately exist, to limit noise pollution....

“Biodiversity is intrinsically scale-dependent”. Bill Kunin, Professor at the University of Leeds, in this second BioDT Talks tackles one of spatial ecology’s biggest challenges: how do we accurately upscale biodiversity data? One of the reason that makes upscaling biodiversity challenging is that biodiversity is an unusual variable. Unlike simple additive variables, biodiversity is subadditive: two areas with 6 and 4 species don’t necessarily contain 10 species together due to potential overlap in the species you had in the different samples. This makes scaling from local observations to regional or global assessments particularly complex. Why does upscaling biodiversity matter? Prof. Kunin...

What are the barriers still preventing the adoption of ICT technologies by small and medium-sized enterprises?There are still many obstacles to overcome, such as the high initial costs to develop and exploit Digital Twins, the lack of in-house technical expertise needed to manage and maintain Digital Twin solutions, limitations and fluctuations in human resources available for innovation projects, the resistance to change, the lack of awareness and understanding of the benefits and potential applications of Digital Twins, regulatory and compliance issues. Moreover, companies frequently worry about the time and efforts required to achieve a return on investment from Digital Twin...

On 20 May 2025, the second day of the EULAC EnergyTRAN mobility event took place at the Statutory Seat of LifeWatch ERIC, located in Plaza de España in Seville, Spain. This initiative is part of the EU-LAC cooperation framework, aiming to strengthen scientific collaboration between European and Latin American research infrastructures, particularly in the environmental and energy transition domains. The second day gathered a diverse delegation of Latin American representatives, including members of: Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina (Julian Asinsten, Martin del Castillo, Lilia Inés Stubrin, Valeria Arza, Martin Obaya, Emanuel López), Tecnológico de Aguascalientes, México (Adrian Bonilla-Petriciolet,...

Imagine standing on the edge of a vast forest, its canopy alive with the chatter of birds, the rustle of leaves, and the occasional flash of colour from a darting butterfly. Now picture this forest fading: a vibrant, thriving ecosystem replaced by silence, its trees felled one by one. What would we lose? What might we gain? This scene isn't a distant possibility - it’s unfolding now. From the peaks of the highest mountains to the depths of the oceans, life thrives. Yet, the biodiversity that sustains humanity is in steep decline. The benefits we once relied upon - clean...

What does computer science have to do with fighting pandemics?In our fifth BioDT Talks episode, Prof. Gianluca Palermo of Politecnico di Milano reveals how in-silico drug discovery and urgent computing are revolutionising medicine. With drug development costing up to $2 billion per medication, computer simulations are accelerating research by evaluating thousands of potential treatments against disease targets before expensive lab testing begins.We all have in mind what happened five years ago during the COVID19 pandemic. During a pandemic, time is a critical factor: finding a medical treatment or a vaccine in short time can limit and reduce the spread of...

Remember struggling to find all the data you needed for a research project? You're not alone!In our fourth BioDT Talks episode, Joana Castro Paupério, Biodiversity Project Manager at the European Nucleotide Archive (EMBL-EBI), shares how her PhD frustrations with incomplete biodiversity data led to her passion for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles. Imagine trying to model genetic diversity of European beetles across environments. Would you find all the necessary data? Would you be able to access crucial context information like geographic coordinates? Could you interpret the data correctly on the basis of the information available? Probably not, as...

“As a little girl, I was roaming around in the forest in spring, enjoying the fact that the snow had melted.I grew up in Norway; we have long winters and looking for the spring flower was one of the favourite activities for kids…And looking for Epatica nobilis (Liver leaf) was one of the most important things we did because we got to get in the local newspaper if you were the first ones. We knew about specific places where the snow melted first and we had some hints of leaves etc that indicated that this is the place where we...