From Data to Digital Twins: Empowering Biodiversity Digital Twins with Research Infrastructures

From Data to Digital Twins

The BioDT Project is reaching its end, and has organised a final webinar on 14 May 2025, exploring the role of Research Infrastructures in powering biodiversity Digital Twins.

This session brings together key partners from GBIF, eLTER, DiSSCo, and LifeWatch ERIC (the latter represented by Joaquin Lopez Lerida).

We will talk about how data, expertise, and technologies contribute to the development of the BioDT prototype Digital Twins, and how the project supports our missions!

To read the full agenda and register, visit:

https://biodt.eu/events/data-digital-twins-empowering-biodiversity-digital-twins-research-infrastructures

7th International Conference on Fish Telemetry

International Conference on Fish Telemetry

Traverse City, USA

The 7th ICFT (International Conference on Fish Telemetry 2025), will be hosted by the Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS) and will be held in Traverse City (Michigan) from June 8 to 13.

The conference brings together research professionals and industry experts to discuss advancements in technology, novel methods, and research results used to advance our understanding of fish behaviour and ecology. This year’s theme is: “unraveling the mysteries of fish to inform management and conservation decisions”.

The European Tracking Network (ETN) – a service powered by LifeWatch Belgium, is among the conference sponsors: its mission is to track aquatic animals across Europe to better understand, protect and manage them.

Learn more about the event: https://event.fourwaves.com/7thicft/pages

GEO Global Forum 2025: The Earth Talks

The Earth Talks

Rome, Italy

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) connects governments, academia, organisations, civil society and the private sector to tackle global challenges through innovative solutions that harness the power of Earth Intelligence.

The network fosters collaboration and equity, making data and services accessible to enhance sustainable development and environmental management in an era of exponential data growth and planetary-scale crises.

On 5 May 2025, LifeWatch ERIC will join “The Earth Talks”, the inaugural GEO Global Forum 2025: a premier global event aiming at inspiring society to harness Earth Intelligence for informed and ambitious actions. The event tackles key topics for the Sustainable Development Goals, such as food security, ecosystems restoration, disasters prevention, and the triple planetary crisis.

Our research infrastructure will be represented by Christos Arvanitidis, CEO, in the Community Event Session 7: ArcticGEOSS and GEO Mountains – Cool Collaborations, that has the objective to exchange on progress in cold-related sciences and discuss potential collaboration paths.

For more information, visit the full event agenda: https://earthobservations.org/about-us/events/geo-global-forum-2025/schedule

EVERSE Webinar on Software Quality Landscape and Indicators

Software Quality

The EVERSE project (https://everse.software) aims to create a framework for research software and code excellence, collaboratively designed and championed by the research communities, in pursuit of building a European network of Research Software Quality and setting the foundations of a future Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence.

The project has organised a series of webinars, the first of which will happen on Tuesday, 15th April 2025, at 10 AM CEST. This event takes place in the context of the project’s work on community-led best practices for developing high-quality research software, which has the objective of building a knowledge hub called the Research Software Quality toolkit (RSQKit).

Following a recent landscape survey on best practices in Research Software Quality (RSQ), Jutta Schnabel (Friedriech-Alexander University) will present the results of the work led so far, and Daniel Garijo (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) will focus on indicators and dimension for RSQ.

For the full agenda and registration details, visit this page: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1531998

EMSO Strategic Workshop

EMSO Strategic Workshop

The EMSO ERIC Strategic Workshop represents a crucial opportunity to discuss and implement the strategic direction of EMSO ERIC.

The event will feature thematic sessions that provide a comprehensive overview of current trends and future directions in EMSO marine research and service provision. There will also be plenary sessions with key representatives from international organisations, research institutions, EU projects, and technology companies.

Alberto Basset, LifeWatch ERIC, will take part in the event to present an overview of the Service Centre.

Visit the event page for more information: https://emso.eu/emso-eric-strategic-workshop-2/

AGROECOLOGY Partnership Event

Agroecology Partnership event

Seville, Spain

From 31 March to 2 April 2025, the city of Seville, Spain, hosts the AGROECOLOGY Partnership event, a key gathering that brings together leading actors from across Europe to advance the transition towards sustainable agroecological systems.

Organised by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), with collaboration from LifeWatch ERIC and the Regional Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water, and Rural Development of Andalusia, this event is framed within the European Partnership on Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures.

Over three days, participants will engage in a dynamic programme of activities, including:

  • The 7th in-person Executive Team Meeting
  • The first physical meeting of the Science and Stakeholder Advisory Board (SciSAB)
  • An Alignment Workshop with sister initiatives
  • A technical visit to IFAPA, the Andalusian Institute of Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training

These sessions will address the current state of play, explore synergies with related initiatives, and identify future strategic actions for the 2025–2027 period. Topics include science-policy interactions, co-creation of knowledge, sustainable production systems, and the use of data platforms to support agroecological transformation.

LifeWatch ERIC, will actively participate in the event through its ICT Core team, Agroecology Coordinator Dr José Manuel Ávila Castuera, and Senior Scientific Manager Dr Iria Soto Embodas. will participate actively in the event. The infrastructure will contribute its expertise in biodiversity and ecosystem research to support the development of integrated, innovative, and sustainable solutions for agriculture in Europe.

This high-level event represents an important opportunity to align agendas, strengthen collaboration, and foster impactful contributions to Europe’s agroecological transition.

Bridging Disciplines: Advancing Research Data Management for Collaborative Innovation

Bridging Disciplines

Bucharest, Romania

The international conference “Bridging Disciplines” takes place on 20 and 21 March at the InterContinental AthéNéE Palace Hotel, in Bucharest.

The objective of the conference is to bring together thought leaders from multiple domains, to discuss the role of metadata, data stewardship, and cross-domain integration for the improvement of data management, sharing and re-use.

Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC’s CEO and Research Director at the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology, and Aquaculture (IMBBC) of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), chairs the session on Life Sciences, on 20 March at 15:45.

The session focusses on collaborative interfaces between Scientific Domains and Disciplines: it explores data interoperability in the life sciences and environmental research, highlighting strategies for integrating diverse datasets to address global challenges.

UEFISCDI organised the conference, funded under the EEA and Norway Grants and co-organised by the Romanian Social Data Archive, with the partnership of LifeWatch ERIC and several other Research Infrastructures.

For more information visit: https://bridge.uefiscdi.ro/

Biodiversity Digital Twins and the Destination Earth Ecosystem

Rome, Italy

The BioDT Project is reaching the end of its mandate and is organising, in collaboration with Destination Earth (DestinE), its final event taking place in Rome on 3 April 2025.

The event, available also for online participation, will highlight BioDT’s key results relevant for the European Commission’s Digital Twin strategy and its integration with the DestinE ecosystem.

Sustainability, interoperability, and the potential adoption of BioDT’s results by European Research Infrastructures and data spaces will be the key topics to drive discussions, scientific presentations and panel debates. Moreover, participants will assist to live demonstrations of prototype Digital Twins (pDTs) developed during the project.

For the agenda, registration, and further details, visit:

https://biodt.eu/events/biodiversity-digital-twins-and-destination-earth-ecosystem

FAIR-IMPACT Workshop on Data FAIRness assessment with F-UJI

F-UJI webinar

The FAIR-IMPACT Project supports the ambitious goal to realise an EOSC of FAIR data and services, by promoting the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services in Europe and beyond. In order to expand Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable solutions across EOSC, the project is identifying proven domain solutions and facilitating their interoperable uptake across scientific domains.

By doing so, it will contribute to transforming the way researchers share and exploit research outputs within and across research disciplines, and to the facilitation of scientific multi-disciplinary cooperation, improving public trust and reproducibility in science.

Within this framework, the project organises a series of public workshops, the FAIR Implementation Series, and on 20 March is happening the next one, called “Using F-UJI to Assess the FAIRness of your Data“.

The workshop will introduce the automated FAIR data assessment tool (F-UJI) and showcase experiences of performed assessments and demos on how to use the tool.

For registration and detailed agenda, please visit:

https://fair-impact.eu/events/fair-impact-events/using-f-uji-assess-fairness-your-data

EGI Conference 2025 and Call for Contributions

EGI Conference 2025

EGI is the federation of computing and storage resource providers: an open ecosystem for research and innovation with the mission to deliver advanced computing and data analytics services for research and innovation. The federation supports data-intensive research with a wide range of advanced computing services.

Every year, the EGI Foundation (the coordinating body of EGI) organises the federation’s flagship event, the EGI Conference, gathering international scientific communities, computing and service providers, representatives of European research projects, security experts, community managers, and policy makers.

All these stakeholders come together to advance research and innovation in data-intensive processing and analytics. If you want to get a feel for the conference, we were there in 2024 to present a few of our services, and we summarised the main highlights in this article.

Besides the talks and presentations, this conference offers a safe and open environment for discussions and networking, making it a key reference event in this domain.

This year’s edition will take place in Santander, Spain, from 2 to 6 June, hosted by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain’s largest public research institution and a key player in the European Research Area (ERA).

The organisers invite participants to share their expertise and ideas with the #EGI2025 audience through a Call for Contributions. They are accepting proposals for short and long talks, posters, and demonstrations. The call opened on 3 February and will remain open until 20 March.

For more information about the EGI Conference 2025, please visit: https://www.egi.eu/event/egi2025/