LifeWatch ERIC 2019 Activities Report

2019 Activities Report

The publication of the LifeWatch ERIC 2019 Activities Report, today, 15 July 2020, marks a mighty milestone. The 36-page document is a record of LifeWatch ERIC’s operations and accomplishments, clarifies what we do and why, and lends greater visibility to our position in the European and global landscape of Research Infrastructures, an invaluable reference on the organisation’s mission and vision, its staff and achievements, financial performance and governance.

Whist chronicling the establishment of LifeWatch as a fully functional ERIC, the report already looks at the future, as Gert Verreet, Chair of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly, says in his foreword: “We are living in interesting times and, surely, the research goalposts are moving. LifeWatch ERIC, the e-Science Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, helps those who want to meet these challenges”.  

LifeWatch CEO Christos Arvanitidis reinforces that positivity: “We’ve certainly come a long way from our establishment as an ERIC in 2017, but the excitement of meeting our challenges is just beginning. We’ve put our ICT team and biodiversity experts together, and they are building the next generation of Virtual Research Environment”.

Giving thanks to staff, acknowledging the support of institutions and representing entities, the 2019 Activities Report demonstrates the alignment that has been created between Common Facilities and Distributed Centres.

High Definition 2019 Activities Report: download.

Light Version 2019 Activities Report: download.

The hard-copy will be printed on 100% recycled paper.

Towards the ENVRI Community Winter School

Data FAIRness Webinar Programme, July–September 2020

For two years in a row already, the ENVRI Community International Summer School on Data FAIRness has been assembling in Lecce, in the middle of the summer season, those researchers, experts and technical staff from different environmental and research infrastructures who want to deepen their knowledge on this topic. Unfortunately, the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions have ordained the postponement of the current edition until the beginning of next year, when the ‘ENVRI Community Winter School on Data FAIRness‘ will take place, still in Lecce. The delay has created the opportunity to enrich our training offerings on the subject, with a series of online webinars dedicated to data management, leading the way ‘Towards the ENVRI community Winter School’.

A Data FAIRness Webinar Programme featuring three webinars have been jointly organised by ENVRI-FAIR and LifeWatch ERIC from July to September 2020, with a focus on helping end users, particularly ENVRI-FAIR project partners and data centre staff, make the best use of their data. Registration for the webinars is free and anyone working in environmental and Earth science research is welcome to take part.

Under the heading of ‘Towards the ENVRI Community Winter School’, the online training series debuts on Monday 13 July 2020. The first broadcast is presented by Zhiming Zhao, from the University of Amsterdam, and will go to air from 9:30 to 12:00 CEST, providing ‘An introduction to Cloud Computing’. 

The second webinar on ‘Workflows Orchestration and Execution’ will follow on Tuesday 14 July, from 10:00-12:00, presented by Nicola Fiore and Lucia Vaira, both from LifeWatch ERIC. 

The third webcast is scheduled for 22 September and will feature Claudio D’Onofrio and Karolina Pantazatou, both from ICOS ERIC, with ‘An Introduction to Jupyter’.

Dates for the ENVRI Community Winter School on Data FAIRness, still to be hosted by the University of Salento in Lecce, will be available soon.