Madrid, Spain, 27–28 February 2023.
The EU LAC ResInfra project Kick-out Meeting will take place in Madrid at the end of February. The project consortium will discuss and analyse project progress and updates, and in particular, LifeWatch ERIC will present its final conclusions and recommendations to the Sustainability Plan as part of WP4. Future actions will also be decided.
Visit the project website.
Malaga, Spain, 21–23 February 2023.
The SMALL SATELLITES & SERVICES INTERNATIONAL FORUM is a workshop for small satellite designers, technicians, developers and launchers. The forum provides the perfect opportunity for experience and knowledge sharing of current and cutting-edge space and small satellite technologies. Over the course of three days the forum will present panels and sessions that will provide answers and insights from the experts, by examining evolving technologies and industry trends that can impact small satellites.
Jaime Lobo, LifeWatch ERIC Satellite & HAPS Operations Manager, will participate on Wednesday 22 February at 2:30 pm in the panel ‘Satellite Constellation & International Cooperation’, as coordinator of the operation of the AGAPA1 satellite. The AGAPA1 satellite has been commissioned by the Andalusian Agricultural and Fisheries Management Agency (AGAPA), along with the Junta de Andalucía, in the framework of the SmartFood project, which is one of the projects led by LifeWatch ERIC. It will monitor the effects of farming on the territory and its natural resources, to underpin future policies on preserving the environment and enabling sustainable farming in the Andalusian region. Now that the satellite has passed its Critical Design Review milestone, it will start assembly and readiness tests, which upon passing will allow it to launch in 2023 on a Falcon 9 from SpaceX (United States). The new AGAPA1 satellite will combine EO technologies with an IoT, radio which can communicate with sensors on the ground that are performing activities such as monitoring soil moisture or crops water content. The IoT radio can then take this information and make automatic decisions based on pre-agreed metrics, such as commanding the sensor to alter the percentage of water in the soil by watering it. This edge computing takes place in real-time, removing the process of manual decision-making on the ground, and could have significant impacts on agricultural territory management on a large scale.
Combining EO data with IoT increases the effectiveness of small satellites by making sense of the huge reams of data produced by the satellite and making it more actionable. The AGAPA1 satellite is planned to be part of OpenConstellation, a global shared satellite infrastructure built and managed by Open Cosmos, which encourages countries, institutions and companies to contribute their own satellites, which will create the world’s biggest mutualised constellation.
Gothenburg and online, 20 March 2023.
Good-quality data is essential to enable successful global climate action. The European Environmental Research Infrastructures, organised in the ENVRI Community, hold a wealth of data on Earth systems critical to tackling global climate challenges. Within the ENVRI-FAIR, a Horizon 2020 project in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner, the ENVRI Community created the ENVRI-Hub, a portal of services to ensure the availability, accessibility and interoperability of this trove of European environmental data.
The ENVRI Community is proud to introduce the ‘ENVRI-Hub’ concept and its achievements during this co-located event. The ENVRI-Hub is the central gateway to FAIR environmental data and services the European environmental research infrastructures offer. It offers a community-built platform that combines a service catalogue, a knowledge base, information on training resources that support service providers and users, and a virtual research environment with several initial science demonstrators, all accessible through a single access interface. Through the ENVRI-Hub, the ENVRI Community directly contributes to the European Open Science Cloud, opening up this wealth of data for exploitation to all scientific users, policymakers, and private partners.
This event will demonstrate several aspects of the technical and data architecture behind the ENVRI-Hub, from assessing the FAIRness of the ENVRIs and identifying the gaps to harmonising technical implementations across different infrastructures. It will also illustrate its value in various real-world science demonstrators. Discussions will follow with a panel of experts about the integration into EOSC, the current strengths and limitations of the ENVRI-Hub and possible future developments.
Panel members: ENVRI-FAIR presenters, Barbara Magagna (GO FAIR), Mark van de Sanden (SURF, EOSC Future), Ville Tenhunen (EGI)
Moderators: Angeliki Adamaki (Co-lead in WP5 of ENVRI-FAIR, Common requirements and testbed for (meta)data services, community standards and cataloguing, ICOS Carbon Portal, Lund University), Jacco Konijn (Part of ENVRI-FAIR communications strategies and tools, UvA, LifeWatch ERIC)
“FAIR environmental data for EOSC and the World: Engineering the ENVRI-Hub”, an RDA co-located event
20.3.23, from 14:00-17:00 CET / 13:00-16:00 UTC
Pascal room, Lindholmen Conference Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden
This event is open to all.
You don’t need to be registered for the 20th RDA General Assembly to attend this event.
> Sign up here <
Brussels, Belgium, 27 September 2023.
ALL-Ready, in collaboration with AE4EU, is organising its final event in Brussels on 27 September 2023. The conference will be hosted by the Committee of the Regions.
The one-day conference will show how the two projects paved the way for a European Network of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures. Experiences from involved Living Labs and Research Infrastructures will give practical insights and a focus will be on how Regions can best support the agroecology transition with the help of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures and what role the future European partnership “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures” will play.
Through a series of panel discussions, the event will discuss how Living Labs and Research Infrastructures can support the agroecology transition. The conference will focus on how Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures can translate theory into practice and will explore lessons learned from three years of project work.
The closing session will focus on how regions can best support Living Labs and Research Infrastructures to drive the agroecology and urban transitions. The role of the Common Agriculture Policy network, local authorities, and the future European partnership “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures” will be discussed.
To register for the conference, please visit this page.
Montréal, Canada, 2–6 October 2023.
Co-hosted by ALL-Ready partners Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and INRAE, this will be a side event within the Adaptation Futures 2023 conference in Montréal, Canada, from October 2 to 6, 2023.
The Forum will feature discussion panels and parallel sessions of scientific papers to establish state-of-the-art practices, share lessons learned from case studies and address challenges facing the international agroecosystem living lab community.
Call for Papers coming soon! More information here.
Bolzano, Italy, 4–8 September 2023.
Organised by OpenGeoHub foundation in collaboration with Eurac Research, the Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2023: Connecting open EO solutions to boost European and global goals, will bring together European and global actors in the field of open-source Earth Observation applications in policy, business, research and for society.
This international event will connect project partners, including data and environmental researchers, public and private sector developers, EU decision- and policymakers, representatives from global institutions, the business sector and civil society to discuss and test solutions to the greatest challenges in geospatial applications.
Through five days featuring international keynote speakers, scientific presentations, discussions, and demonstrative workshops, the participants of the OEMC Global Workshop 2023 will explore valuable opportunities and establish tangible collaborations to improve geospatial research and application products in open-source.
Earth Observations and geospatial data —and their derived information— play crucial roles in monitoring regional, national and global environmental and climate targets proposed by the ambitious European Green Deal. Practitioners and decision-makers are therefore in need of accessible, science-based tools for timely and informed decisions as well as for long-term planning, progress tracking and transparent evaluation processes.
Open-Earth-Monitor project’s main aim is to directly support the implementation of the European Green Deal, and the European Digital Transition, the EuroGEO (Europe’s part of the Group on Earth Observations) and overall the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How? By producing and integrating a range of open-source, data-based and user-friendly tools to monitor European and global environmental trends, and for ecosystem services accounting in constant collaboration with user communities.
Online, 25 January 2023.
This EOSC Future training module is intended for service providers who want to use a scripted approach to onboard, and later update, services to the EOSC portal. This is especially useful if you are managing a large number of services.
The training module is for all potential providers from all disciplines and is applicable for providers working with a range of stakeholder groups.
Catalin Condurache, EGI Foundation
Antonis Lempesis, ATHENA RC
Michael Zouros, ATHENA RC
Konstantinos Spyrou, ATHENA RC
Thanassis Mantes, ATHENA RC
Aggeliki Gkamiliari, ATHENA RC
Part 1 – Overview about the EOSC Portal REST APIs for on-boarding new services in EOSC
Part 2 – Overview about the new functionality and the REST API
Part 3 – Hands-on/Live demo on how to use the EOSC Portal REST APIs
Online, 23 January 2023.
Following on the December webinar on ‘How to write Privacy Policy (PP) and Terms of Use (TOU) documentation for the EOSC Portal‘, EOSC Future is organising another hands-on online training workshop in January.
During this training workshop, service providers will have the chance to expose their prototype documents for Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. In turn, they will get advice and recommendations from our trainers.
Spaces are limited, so make sure to register, via the form at this link, by 17 January 2023, 17.00 CET.
Gothenburg, Sweden, 20 March 2023.
On 20 March 2023 from 12–5pm CET, EOSC Future and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) are organising a satellite event in conjunction with the RDA 20th Plenary Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden (21–23 March).
Under the heading, ‘Building blocks of Global Research Commons: Europe and beyond’, the half-day event will touch on the main issues related to practical implementation of research commons. To this end, the event will attract an international audience of key actors involved in implementing research commons at disciplinary, regional or national levels, funders, data experts, technical managers, and in general.
Panellists will open with global perspectives on implementation approaches, examining themes and challenges of assembling the main features of a research commons. The second part of the event will showcase examples of how RDA’s diverse data community are tackling challenges.
EOSC Future will also share examples, via its RDA Open Calls programme, related to the practical aspects of implementation such as:
Do you want to get a deeper understanding of the different types of global research commons and their priorities? What about examples of roadmaps and frameworks for overcoming challenges associated with global research commons as well as an understanding of research community needs? This event will provide an opportunity to learn about different approaches and examples of implementation, with the ultimate goal of supporting global coordination and alignment for such research commons.
Registration will open later in 2023.
In the meantime, you can find more information about the programme via the RDA Plenary 20 site.
With over 12 500 members from 145 countries, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) provides a neutral international, community-driven forum where data professionals come together to develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and re-use. Read more about RDA here. RDA is well-placed to contribute to developing disciplinary standards from EOSC coming from its grassroots community.
Updates on the EOSC Future website.
Online, 13 February 2023.
The Biodiversity Digital Twin‘s design, implementation, and maintenance present several issues, including the linkage and integration of various data types and related computing services. Consequently, FAIR principles are extremely important, especially during the modelling and prototyping process.
Over the last few months, the BioDT team has been discussing how to understand the FAIRness of the data sources. In particular, the team engaged in improving “Quality of Data, Workflows and Models through FAIR Principles” is tasked with delivering an implementation plan for FAIR Digital Objects over the FAIR data designs of the relevant Research Infrastructures. The team is working to find gaps in understanding FAIR implementation and how it connects to BioDT, even though FAIR principles and the technological elements supporting Digital Twins are not new.
To facilitate discussions around this topic, the BioDT consortium is organising a series of online webinars to stimulate conversations around FAIR with a focus on BioDT and the digital twinning paradigm. Experts and practitioners that deal with different aspects of FAIR implementation and digital twins are invited to join to stimulate discussions that help understand FAIR implementation in a more actionable way.
The second session is taking place on 13 February at 16:00 (CET) and provides an overview of FAIR tools applicable to digital twinning.
Do not hesitate to learn more about this fascinating topic by registering for free!
The Greek National Distributed Centre is funded by the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology and is coordinated by the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, in conjunction with 47 associated partner institutions.
To know more about how Greece contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Italian National Distributed Centre is led and managed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and is coordinated by a Joint Research Unit, currently comprising 35 members. Moreover, Italy hosts one of the LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities, the Service Centre.
To know more about how Italy contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Dutch National Distributed Centre is hosted by the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam. Moreover, The Netherlands hosts one of the LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities, the Virtual Laboratory and Innovation Centre.
To know more about how The Netherlands contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Portuguese National Distributed Centre is managed by PORBIOTA, the Portuguese e-Infrastructure for Information and Research on Biodiversity. Led by BIOPOLIS/CIBIO-InBIO – Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, PORBIOTA connects the principal Portuguese research institutions working in biodiversity.
To know more about how Portugal contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Slovenian National Distributed Centre is led by the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). It focuses on the development of technological solutions in the field of biodiversity and socio-ecosystem research.
To know more about how Slovenia contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Spanish National Distributed Centre is supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Regional Government of Andalusia and the Guadalquivir River Basin Authority (Ministry for Ecological Transition-MITECO). Moreover, Spain is the hosting Member State of LifeWatch ERIC, the location of its Statutory Seat & ICT e-Infrastructure Technical Office (LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities).
To know more about how Spain contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Bulgarian National Distributed Centre is represented by the Agricultural University-Plovdiv.
To know more about how Bulgaria contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.
The Belgian National Distributed Centre makes varied and complementary in-kind contributions to LifeWatch ERIC. These are implemented in the form of long-lasting projects by various research centres and universities distributed throughout the country and supported by each respective political authority.
To know more about how Belgium contributes to LifeWatch ERIC, please visit our dedicated webpage.