Leading. Pioneering. Inspiring. | Inaugural address by LifeWatch ERIC CEO

LifeWatch CEO

Today is a very humbling day for me. It reminds me of my very first days with LifeWatch, when the idea of such a Research Infrastructure (RI) was conceived and then announced to the marine biodiversity community during the kick-off meeting of the MarBEF Network of Excellence, back in 2004. Like all of you, I was an enthusiast of LifeWatch (LW) RI and since then, I have been involved in the design, the development and operation of this great RI. The vision of this perpetual process of construction, operation and evolution of such an RI, where people meet and collaborate in cyberspace in order to test their hypotheses on biodiversity and ecosystem research, has never stopped fascinating and inspiring me.

Since the early times of LW, I saw clearly how we can empower people to do and achieve things never attempted before with our creations and ultimately make the LW RI a better place to work. By analyzing, understanding and modelling Biodiversity and Ecosystem functioning, we provide science-based evidence to preserve and sustainably use our resources, our biodiversity, our ecosystems and the services they provide to our common planet. I felt there was no better RI to join if I wanted to try to make a difference to this discipline. This is the very same inspiration that continues to drive me today. It is, therefore, an incredible honour for me to lead and serve LifeWatch ERIC (LW ERIC) and above all the community interested in this discipline. I’ve been fortunate to lead the construction and operation phase of LifeWatchGreece RI and work closely with all members of the LW ERIC Executive Board and General Assembly over the last five years. I have, therefore, gained a good knowledge of what has been done so far but I’m also looking forward to working with the members of the broader LW ERIC community. This community has achieved, so far, a great success, but we are all so hungry to do a lot more. As we depart on this new journey of LifeWatch ERIC together, I wanted to share some background on myself and what inspires and motivates me. 

What has been achieved so far at LifeWatch?

LifeWatch has undergone a remarkable evolution during the three years of its existence as an ERIC: (a) the legal entities and bodies that are absolutely necessary for its operation have been established; (b) both the headquarters and the distributed components of the ERIC have been hosted in physical installations; (c) a lot of the machinery to be used has been purchased and is already in operation; (d) currently, we’re on the process of the integration of all the technology (e.g. data, tools and services) that has been developing over the past years by the national nodes of LW ERIC. I feel extremely grateful to all those who have worked hard for LW ERIC to become a reality, those pioneers who have laid the foundations of LW ERIC.

Our ERIC respects three things: (a) science, the driving force for the production of new knowledge; (b) innovation, an essential aspect for the RI to make a difference not only to science but also to the attitude of the community involved; and (c) community, the most critical of all the ingredients for the successful development and implementation of an RI.

Who am I?

I am 53. I’ve been a humble servant of biodiversity and ecosystem research discipline for almost a quarter of a century now. And like anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my research family and my overall life experiences. I’ve spent many thousands of hours digging in mudflats and lagoons, sampling the ports, the coastal substrates by SCUBA diving or from a scientific vessel or inflatable and so many more hours at the microscope, conducting traditional taxonomy on countless thousands of creatures, and on computer screens, trying to analyse the data. I have been running the Biodiversity laboratory in the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture (HCMR) for more than fifteen years now. This laboratory conducts research on the cutting edge of ecology, genetics/genomics and cyber-taxonomy, using the institute’s state-of-the-art heavy instrumentation such as micro-CT scanners and next generation sequencers. I have worked with people in the field, in the laboratory, with people at all levels of investigation, from the technicians to computer scientists, and stakeholders and policy makers at local, regional, national and European (international) levels. My special drive in my scientific life is an insatiable thirst for learning new things, doing new things, wondering, discovering, reading, writing, training, teaching. That’s me, that’s how I think, what I do and how I live my life.

Why am I here?

I am right here for the same reason I think most members of this wonderful research (and not only) community: to change the current way scientists conduct biodiversity and ecosystem research through the ever-growing Research Infrastructure of LW ERIC; to work hard in order that LW ERIC provide them with Virtual Research Environments (VREs) where they can carry out almost the entire process of research making, from the conception of the idea and formulation of the hypotheses to test, all the way to the interpretation of the results and the production of knowledge. Over the next decade we shall witness that power- and cloud-computing will become even more ubiquitous and that artificial intelligence and intelligence from machine learning will prevail in our discipline. We will also witness a faster co-evolution of hardware, software and scientific thinking. All these create a wonderful challenge for us to achieve our mission.

Why is LifeWatch ERIC here?

When we started this journey of the RIs foundation, our mission was to create machine-to-machine readable data and to develop software (web tools and services) for data analysis, a task which over the last couple of decades has created a big ecosystem of both data and services. The opportunity ahead requires us to re-imagine and re-think a lot of what we have done in the past for this community and to create new things.

Our big challenges require VREs where both data and software can be combined, integrated and used to: (a) test complex hypotheses on biodiversity and ecosystem patterns and processes at multiple levels of the biological organization and scales of observation; (b) explore and model the consequences from possible alterations in these patterns and processes as a result of multiple drivers of change. We are the only ones who can harness the power of such VREs through devices and web services that truly empower every researcher or any other type of user in doing biodiversity and ecosystem research. We are the only RI with a past history and a continuing focus on laying the foundations for building those VREs that create great opportunities. What we do empowers our community to do more of what they care about, that is, to accomplish great things and in so doing, also to have fun and real enjoyment. Ultimately, this is what makes the hard core of who we are, and meeting our future great challenges and achieving our goals is why we are here.

What do we do next?

We’re fortunate to have a clear vision and sense of mission that leads us to imagine, design and deliver our next generation of biodiversity and ecosystem research products and services. Our mission for the next period of LW ERIC is to turn scientists’ attitude from working in isolation in a single-core PC and with licensed software into using and benefiting from an ecosystem of web services publicly available on the web site of the LW RI with huge data management effort and support, storage capacity and computational power, which provides them not only with the capability to scale up their research interests and work on global hypotheses but it also ensures transparency, repeatability and attribution for their endeavour. All of the above constitute the very fundamentals of the scientific method and production of knowledge. Therefore, the vision for LW ERIC should be to achieve this groundbreaking change in the way most scientists on biodiversity and ecosystem research currently work: to change their everyday habits by opening the LW RI web page as they turn on their PCs and use their preferred operational platforms. This change would direct most of the scientific effort from a single-core brain (SCBs) operation or “brain-etics” to high-performance brain network synthesis (HPBNs) or “brain-omics”. This is a cultural change we have to drive our community. 

This is the only way to ensure that the research effort goes far beyond the personal interests of each scientist and delivers a synthetic view of the phenomena and processes we explore, trying to understand and provide prognosis in the discipline of biodiversity and ecosystem research. Delivering such a science-based synthetic knowledge is the best way to address current and urgent societal demands and assist the EU efforts for growth and job creation.

Our new LifeWatch tagline: Leading. Pioneering. Inspiring.

During the next period of LW ERIC, every one of us needs to do our best and try to make this cultural change happen. What is clearer than ever before, though, is that we cannot achieve any degree of success if we choose to pursue the above goals independently. We need to do this, together and with our community.

Many Research Infrastructures aspire to bring about cultural changes, changes to the current landscape, and to achieve the de-fragmentation of their communities. Very few though have all the elements required: physical installations, hardware, software, data and data observatories, resources, and above all, the right people to do the job. LifeWatch ERIC RI has proven that it has all of them and in abundance.

As the new CEO, I can’t ask for a better foundation.

Let’s build on this foundation together.

Christos Arvanitidis.

Acknowledgements:

I’m very grateful to the former CEO Jesús Miguel Santamaría Ulecia, the interim CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda and the members of the Executive Board, Prof. Alberto Basset and Prof. Peter van Tienderen, for their Herculean work to make this ERIC operational; also Prof. Jesus Marco de Lucas vice-President of CSIC and Prof. Enrique Alonso Council of State for the Kingdom of Spain for their continuous support at all levels and phases; the former Chair of the General Assembly Prof. Benjamin Sánchez Gimeno, our deceased Chair Mr Marc de Jong, our current acting Chair Mr Gert Verreet and the members of the General Assembly for laying the foundations of this ERIC; the LifeWatch ERIC staff for all the hard work and dedication they put in daily; the national coordinators and their teams for their massive support and for building the components of this wonderful Research Infrastructure and finally our scientific community for being the soul of LifeWatch ERIC. I’m much indebted to all of you and I hope my service here will meet your expectations.

LifeWatch Greece

LifeWatch Greece

The LifeWatch Greece Research Infrastructure was funded by the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) under the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) (ESFRI, MIS 384676) and coordinated by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) – Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture (IMBBC). A total of 47 Research Institutes and Academic Departments participate as associated partners.

The overall objective of LifeWatch Greece is to develop and fulfil the vision for the Greek LifeWatch RI and to establish it as the biodiversity Centre of Excellence for South-eastern Europe, contributing with specific services to the European LifeWatch and other international users.

Following the successful construction and implementation of LifeWatch Greece RI, a series of services and virtual laboratories (vLabs) have been released in the LifeWatch Greece portal, such as the Data Services, the RvLab, the Medobis vLab and the MicroCT vLab.

In addition, a LifeWatch Greece Special Collection was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, describing the development of the relevant electronic infrastructure and the software applications, a series of taxonomic checklists compiled under the Greek Taxon Information System, as well as a section of data papers presenting historical and original datasets of environmental and biodiversity data.

The multidisciplinary approach of LifeWatchGreece aims to support the potential needs regarding the mobilisation, analysis and sharing of biodiversity datasets, not only for the scientific community, but also for the broader domain of biodiversity management.

LifeWatch Greece continues as an RI to to contribute to LifeWatch ERIC and to participate to its multiple events. It also contributes to a few more, such as CMBR, ELIXIR_GR, BioImaging_GR.

Big data, new media, new methods of management, analysis and interpretation: Achievements and Challenges

On 20 March 2019 (18.00-20.00) in the L.Zervas amphitheatre, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Christos Arvanitidis, at the time representative of of our Greek Node and currently CEO of LifeWatch ERIC, was invited to give his talk on ‘Big data, new media, new methods of management, analysis and interpretation: Achievements and Challenges’.

The whole talk is available online in English at this address http://helios-eie.ekt.gr/EIE/handle/10442/16159, and the the full presentation can be downloaded here.

During the talk, Christos Arvanitidis discussed key topics like management policy and data use, as well as the analytical applications of LifeWatchGreece, and presented three network applications:

(a) The MedOBIS Virtual Lab  (MedOBISvLab) which hosts, manages and shares marine biodiversity data, and features geo- and bio-annotation and references.
(b) The Microtomography Virtual Lab (micro_CT vLab) that hosts. manages, analyses and disseminates big data from the field of microtomography.
(c) The R Virtual Lab (R_yLab) which stores extensive environmental data and is widely used by scientists and researchers.

LifeWatch ERIC Data Centres Working Meeting

LifeWatch-SI

Biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems, including those precious services sustaining our life and our societies, are at risk, affecting the ecological sustainability of our Planet, our well-being and our future.

LifeWatch ERIC, the European e-Science Infrastructure of Biodiversity and Ecosystem research (www.lifewatch.eu) has organised a meeting in Ljubljana, on 13–14 December 2019, discussing with representatives of Common Facilities, National Nodes and the wider Slovenian scientific community and partners in the LifeWatch Slovenia consortium on the vision, mission and operational priorities of the research infrastructure. The ambition was to deploy the proper e-Infrastructure to scientists in order to build the science-based knowledge needed by all stakeholders, including local communities, in order to address these key global challenges.

The meeting has been focused on biodiversity and ecosystem data management, since the data already available, and big data, that are going to be collected through new technologies and the work of thousands of scientists in Europe, are the foundation to build the new knowledge required within the context of climate changes and biodiversity loss. However, it is necessary that Open Science becomes a reality and proper tools, allowing scientists to find, access, integrate, re-use and analyse the data already collected by the scientific community, actually developed and made available. These issues and the organisation of Distributed Data Centres on biodiversity and ecosystem research have been discussed in the meeting with the contribution of scientists from Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia LifeWatch Nodes, as well as from other environmental research infrastructures, particularly researchers also contributing to DiSSCo, Distributed Systems for Scientific Collections.

The meeting has also highlighted the global relevance of the scientific research of the Slovenian Institutions on biodiversity and ecosystems to address these global challenges from experience on model ecosystem types distributed at the Biosphere scale and relevant in the context of climate change.

Metadata, Vocabularies & Ontologies

Metadata Vocabularies Ontologies

On 12 & 13 November, the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre organised the first working meeting on “Metadata, Controlled Vocabularies and Ontologies” in Lecce, Italy.

The aim of the meeting was to set a roadmap for a common strategy to be adopted on these within the LifeWatch ERIC community and in accordance with the FAIR principles.

Biodiversity Data Journal accepted into Science Citation Index Expanded

We are glad to inform you that the Biodiversity Data Journal, an international peer-review Journal, focusing on
open data, ontologies, data standards and protocols, and which publishes many of the LifeWatchGreece articles, has been accepted for indexing in Scopus, after successfully completing a rigorous evaluation process.

Currently, the journal is to be indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and listed in the respective Journal Citation Reports with a Journal Impact Factor and related metrics.

We congratulate the editorial team for this achievement marking an important milestone for the entire scientific community.

More info:

https://blog.pensoft.net/2018/11/13/biodiversity-data-journal-in-science…https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/pp-bdj111318.php

Great success for LifeWatch ERIC at EMBS53

The 53rd European Marine Biology Symposium, organised by LifeWatch Belgium and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Ostend (Belgium, 17 – 21 September 2018), witnessed a great success with the participation of 169 researchers and academics from 25 different countries.

The “Science in a modern era” session focused exactly on these issues, featuring Christos Arvanitidis and Francisco Hernandez (Scientific responsible for LifeWatchGreece and LifeWatch Belgium, respectively) as its chairmen, and counted many oral communications from the LifeWatch ERIC community. LifeWatch ERIC was also featured in the “Science from a historical perspective” session and in the “Science in the North Sea” session.

The programme and all presented abstracts are available for download at the following address http://www.embs53.org/conference-programme

In parallel, LifeWatch Belgium exhibition booth allowed demonstrations of several infrastructure components of the Belgian marine LifeWatch observatory, such as plankton imaging devices, acoustic detection devices and the innovative underwater tripod with acoustic release system.

Should you wish to find out more about the symposium, information, abstract book and presentations are available on the conference website (http://www.embs53.org).

LifeWatchGreece at WCMB

From 11 to 16 May 2018, LifeWatchGreece was in Montréal, Canada, to join the 4th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity held in the Palais des Congrès de Montréal.

The WCMB has become a major focal assembly for sharing research outcomes, management and policy issues, and for discussions of the role of biodiversity and biodiversity conservation in sustaining ocean ecosystems. The 4th WCMB theme – Connecting with the living ocean – is underlining the need to replace our current exploitation relationship with the ocean’s living resources, with a sustainable connection based on scientific knowledge.

Representatives of LifeWatchGreece also attended the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON)  Workshop, on Tuesday 17 May 2018 at the McGill University.

LW BE 1st Users & Stakeholders Meeting

LifeWatch Belgium held its first Users & Stakeholders meeting in Ostend, on 25 and 26 January 2018.

The meeting was open to all known users and stakeholders of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure. In total, 87 participants from a multitude of Belgian research institutes and universities, registered for this very interesting and successful event.

Please read below for an account of the meeting.

The meeting was open to all known users and stakeholders of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure. In total, 87 participants from a multitude of Belgian research institutes and universities, registered for this very interesting and successful event.

Day 1 (Thursday January 25th 2018) started with a view from the science-policy perspective on the LifeWatch ESFRI; and an introduction about LifeWatch as a European e-science infrastructure to support biodiversity and ecosystem research. After a presentation about the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone, the Belgian LifeWatch partners each presented a comprehensive overview of their ongoing projects, the achieved results from the previous years and the future plans. The remainder of the day, these infrastructure projects and their applications were showcased more into detail in the form of several user stories.
 
Participants learned about (1) Catrein: towards a cameratrap research infrastructure; (2) DNA Barcoding for Forensics; (3) Detection and identification of mosquito species (Culicidae) in Belgium; (4) Saigas on the brink: multi-disciplinary analysis of the factors influencing mass mortality events; (5) The use of ecotopes for biodiversity conservation: the case of Violet Coper (Lycaena helle); (6) ANTABIS: feedback and perspectives from a long-term user; and (7) EMODnet Biology as a user of the LifeWatch infrastructure. Day 1 was concluded with 2 presentations by international LifeWatch partners: LifeWatch Greece and LifeWatch Sweden, thus demonstrating the international collaborations of LifeWatch Belgium.

On Day 2 (Friday January 26th 2018), the user stories continued: (8) Towards a qualitative spatial sensor network for long term observation of harbor porpoises; (9) Is this for (r)eel? Permanent fish tracking in Flanders with acoustic telemetry; (10) GPS-tracking migration and foraging movements of Western Marsh Harrier Circus aeruginosus breeding in the Low Countries; (11) From GPS data to daily decisions in 2 sympatric gull species; (12) Long-term monitoring of climate change effects on short vegetation; (13) Building and using the MarineSPEED benchmark dataset; and (14) Linking occurrences, traits and the environment to map the diversity of marine life.

During Friday afternoon, twelve demonstrations were organized to familiarize participants with LifeWatch tools and systems. Guided demo tours led the participants through interactive demonstrations on LifeWatch Data Explorer; Swedish LifeWatch Analysis Portal; New Antarctic Biodiversity Data Portal; European Tracking Network (ETN); Live demo of the camera traps; Live demo of the ZooScan; LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone; LifeWatch Marine VRE; LifeWatch Wallonia-Brussels WebGIS; Knock knock, who’s there? (bat calls); RGBIF package; and WateRinfo package.

The agenda can be consulted on the link below. The user stories abstract booklet can be downloaded here.

The event clearly demonstrated that the Belgian LifeWatch community is quite active. The multitude of interesting and impressive user stories showcased the individual projects that are going on and the immense progress LifeWatch Belgium is making.