Project GREENCOOP: Green Transition through Cooperation models

GREENCOOP Project Iria

The GREENCOOP Project (https://www.lifewatch.eu/greencoop) is designed to revitalise rural areas, by integrating Agroecology and Digital Innovations (ADIs), into novel Rural Communities Business Models (RCBMs). The project started at the end of 2025 and will last for 4 years, bringing together Living Labs from Europe and China into a hybrid network of Rural Innovation Business Communities.

The main ambition of GREENCOOP is to foster the agroecology and digital transition of EU and China farm systems, and use the RCBMs to integrate, interconnect, and make them adaptable to different contexts, boosting and accelerating the adoption rates of ADIs by farmers within the new RCBM.

LifeWatch ERIC leads Work Package 2, with the objective to diagnose the territory, design the Agroecological Digital Demonstrators and generate a data infrastructure that integrates information from the ADIs.

Iria Soto, Senior Scientific Manager at LifeWatch ERIC, has recently talked about this in a short interview published by GREENCOOP: watch the video here!

Marine SABRES School Competition returns for its last edition on 22 May

Marine SABRES School Competition - Final Edition

Marine SABRES is launching the third and final edition of its Serious Game School Competition, inviting secondary schools across Europe to take part in a unique learning experience focused on the ocean. Registration is now open for teachers.

The event will take place on 22 May 2026, in occasion of the International Day for Biological Diversity and the European Maritime Day, from 09:00 to 17:00 CEST.

Following the previous edition, which brought together 13 classes from 5 schools across Europe, the competition continues to grow as a space for collaboration between classrooms and researchers.

Over the course of the day, students will explore ways human communities can manage, protect, and benefit from marine ecosystems through an online serious game developed together with a European network of researchers. Classes will move through a series of challenges and quizzes, using the game as a starting point for discussion and learning.

This initiative is designed for teachers of natural and social sciences, English and CLIL, citizenship, and environmental or sustainability education, and supports both lower (10-13) and upper (14-18) secondary students. Only teachers can register and, on the day of the School Competition, they will mentor their students while they play the online serious game.

Now in its final edition, the School Competition marks the closing chapter of the Marine SABRES educational journey: an opportunity for schools to take part in a shared European experience that brings science and sustainability into the classroom in a practical way.

Registration is open until the day of the event. Teachers can sign up their class and join the final edition here: https://zfrmz.eu/HwvUDABMlOFCTr9UY0ch

Harmonising vegetation structure metrics across Europe through Large-scale airborne LiDAR processing

LiDAR

From 11 to 13 March 2026, LifeWatch ERIC was involved in a three-day technical workshop on large-scale airborne LiDAR processing for vegetation structure analysis.

The event was hosted at SustainaLab (University of Amsterdam), and organised by W. Daniel Kissling, Yifang Shi, and Jinhu Wang as part of the EU-funded Mambo Project (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of BiOdiversity), an initiative that develops remote-sensing and AI-based tools to improve biodiversity monitoring across Europe. LifeWatch ERIC, the Netherlands eScience Center, and SURF contributed their expertise to the event programme.

Over the three days, the event brought together 21 researchers, data scientists, and remote sensing specialists working across ecology, forestry, and Earth observation. LifeWatch ERIC VLIC members Zhiming Zhao, Koen Greuell, and Gabriel Pelouze participated with the presentation “Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): a virtual research environment” (Zhiming Zhao) and a hands-on practical session “Laserfarm in NaaVRE” (Gabriel Pelouze, Koen Greuell).

The practical trainings focused on running Laserfarm workflows on HPC infrastructure, using NaaVRE for LiDAR processing, extracting vegetation structure metrics in Google Colab or local Jupyter environments, and delineating individual trees from 3D LiDAR point clouds.

The final discussions explored how to harmonise vegetation structure metrics across Europe, and laid the groundwork for developing a roadmap for large-scale airborne LiDAR processing that supports biodiversity monitoring, forest analysis, and ecosystem research. Participants shared the common goal of moving from local LiDAR processing, to reproducible and scalable workflows.

The event was also an opportunity for LifeWatch ERIC to gather feedback to further improve NaaVRE, especially in terms of scalability, of the ability to customise configurations, support for deep learning models, and overall flexibility and user experience.

To read more about this workshop, visit the official event page: https://www.mambo-project.eu/events/workshop-large-scale-and-scalable-processing-airborne-lidar-vegetation-structure-analysis

Picture from LinkedIn

Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging session at the 7th WCMB.

Animal movement

Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging, is one of LifeWatch ERIC’s Thematic Services Working Groups, networks of Common Facilities and Distributed Centres members, coordinated by the Service Centre.

These WGs implement activities, developments, and physical outcomes of the RI’s Thematic Services in 8 key priority areas (with more to come). Among these, animal tracking is the practice of monitoring and studying animal movements and behaviour in their natural environment from a distance, across spatial and temporal scales, using a suit of tools and technologies.

This practice provides as an advantage the possibility to gather robust data over extended temporal periods and regardless of challenging conditions, with minimal environmental disturbance or interference with the animal behaviour. What makes animal tracking a priority area for LifeWatch ERIC, is the fact that it can offer information about the biology and ecology of organisms that is crucial to establish conservation framework and regulations, and to make predictions on the animals adaptation to human activities.

Jan Reubens (Flanders Marine Institute), Coordinator of this WG, is co-convening a session with Pieterjan Verhelst (Research Institute for Nature and Forest) in occasion of the 7th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (Bruges, Belgium, 17-20 November 2026).

The Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging panel collects works that offer practical examples and insights on tracking fish with acoustic transmitters, following bird migrations with GPS tags, assessing wildlife presence with camera traps, monitoring presence of marine mammals with passive acoustics, and more.

The session (see 7.3 on this page) falls under the scope of Theme 7 of the conference (together with other five ones). The theme, titled Taking the pulse of the ocean: measuring the current marine biodiversity state and how it impacts us, is open to monitoring programs, networks and activities, to share history, progress, status and lessons learnt. Particular attention is given to the impact of these works on the knowledge of the marine environment, and to data interoperability.

Follow the updates on the programme and read more on the 7th WCMB page: https://www.wcmb2026.org/7-Taking-the-pulse-of-the-ocean-measuring-the-current-marine-biodiversity-state-and-how-it-impacts-us.

BEeS 2026: released the Call for Abstracts topics. Join us in Plovdiv!

LifeWatch ERIC Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference (BEeS) is back. This summer, we have the pleasure of inviting you to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, for a four-day appointment, from 7 to 10 July. LifeWatch Bulgaria, through the Agricultural University-Plovdiv, hosts the third edition of the conference for 2026.

The event will start with a set of Pre-conference workshops on 7 July, while the plenary and contributed sessions will take place from 8 July onwards. Plenary speakers Prof. Vladislav Popov and Prof. Tatyana Bileva (Agricultural University-Plovdiv), Dr. Anne Fouilloux (LifeWatch ERIC), and Prof. Carl Beierkuhnlein (University of Bayreuth/Universidad de Granada), will present sessions on biodiversity conservation, responses to climate change, agroecology, as well as new frontiers for eScience technologies.

Besides the plenary session, the conference welcomes contributions collected through a Call for Abstracts, and a series of Masterclasses and Training sessions on how to use specific LifeWatch ERIC services. The abstracts collected will be published on the conference Book of Abstracts after the event, as well as submitted for publication on the ARPHA platform.

BEeS 2026 also offers some publication opportunities on three different journals, you can follow the updates on this page: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-publication-opportunities.

We welcome participants to submit their abstracts for either a shorter, or longer contributed session (10 or 15 minutes), in one of the selected topics:

  • Uniting science for human, animal, plant and ecosystem health
  • Metagenomics and eDNA for biodiversity and ecosystems
  • Animal traits, behavior and bio-tracking
  • Biodiversity observatories and environmental monitoring
  • Habitat mapping
  • Biogeography: biodiversity conservation across regions and ecosystems
  • Biodiversity and ecosystem responses to climate change
  • Restoration of our oceans and waters
  • Taxonomic data services
  • Semantics and data curation for biodiversity and ecosystem research
  • Soil mission & Microbiology
  • Agroecology

The preliminary programme is available on the BEeS 2026 minisite, and the Call for Abstracts is open until 15 May: submit your work here: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-abstract-submission. The registration form and logistic information will be published very soon. Stay tuned!

About LifeWatch Bulgaria:

Bulgaria joined LifeWatch ERIC in 2022 as one of its eight Distributed Centres (https://www.lifewatch.eu/organisation-governance/bulgaria), where the Agricultural University-Plovdiv is the official national scientific organisation. The Distributed Centre provides services such as lab and field testing, agricultural practices assessment, advanced agrobiodiversity monitoring and land use analysis, as well as open-source collaboration, AI services and plant health infrastructure.