LifeWatch Italy

LifeWatch Italy

Italy is a founding member of LifeWatch ERIC and has always been strongly supported by a broad and transdisciplinary national scientific community. The involvement of the Italian scientific community resulted in the establishment of a Joint Research Unit, coordinated and led by the National Research Council (CNR). The JRU is composed of 34 active members, including high level institutions, scientific academies, national research institutes, international organisations, 20 universities, regional agencies, and an array of consortia and corporations (please see here for the full list). The prominence, quantity and diversity of our members represent the foundation of a national network that is pre-eminently capable of tackling the key topics of scientific debates of our days: biodiversity, ecosystems and e-Science.

Since its establishment in 2010, LifeWatch Italy has created the national e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research. Today, thanks to the ambitious LifeWatchPLUS project freshly granted by the Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) with an investment of about 8 million euros in only three years, LifeWatch Italy is working to reinforce its national Infrastructure. Thanks to this action, LW-ITA will be capable of providing unprecedented computational power to advance the application of semantic resources, and the elaboration of data & metadata. This investment specifically aims at providing tools and platforms to support citizen science & education initiatives, while ensuring at the same time a tremendous expansion in the Infrastructure’s communication ability, which will soon include an advanced multimedia production centre and a museum. The latter makes it possible to virtually visit four types of ecosystems (mountain, semi-arid, polar and coastal/marine) accessing research data, information sheets, multimedia and 3D contents, supported by learning tools presented as serious games.

To find out more, please visit www.lifewatchitaly.eu.

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.

Call for study cases in LW-ITA VREs and MoBiLab

LifeWatch Italy calls for proposals to develop study cases in/at:

1) the Phyto VRE and Alien Species VRE – LifeWatch Italy invites the interested researchers to submit projects proposals involving the re-use and/or the customization of resources produced by LW-ITA or by other initiatives (including infrastructures and projects), their integration with resources available to the project proponents, and the implementation of new e-services required to address the specific project questions – please download the full call

2) the distributed Laboratory of “Molecular Biodiversity” – LifeWatch Italy invites the interested researchers to submit projects proposals involving the production of molecular data through “Next Generation sequencing” technologies (e.g. sequencing of amplicons, genomes, metagenomes, transcriptomes and meta-transcriptomes) and their bioinformatic analysis – please download the full call.

Proposals shall be drafted using our application form and submitted via email (lifewatchitalia[at]unisalento.it) by 21 December 2018.

International Summer School on “Data Management in Environmental and Earth Science Infrastructures”

Between 9 – 13 July, around 40 academics, researchers, PhD students, data managers and research infrastructure developers from all across Europe gathered in Lecce, to join the International Summer School on “Data Management in Environmental and Earth Science Infrastructures: theory and practice”, organised by the H2020 ENVRIplus project and the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre.

In recent years, one of the major challenges in environmental and earth science has been managing and using continuously growing volumes of data collected across multiple disciplines, and educating both scientists and developers on how best to do so. Many different standards, approaches, and tools have now been developed to support the research data lifecycle, which need to be examined and, where appropriate, adopted by a wider community. In particular, modern semantic technologies provide a promising way to properly describe and interrelate different data sources in ways that reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among environmental and ecological resources and the researchers who use them.

To address these challenges, ENVRIplus and the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre organised a five-day summer school providing an unique insight into the contemporary debate on data management in the environmental and earth sciences. The programme, combining theory with hands-on sessions, explored themes as diverse as reference modelling and research metadata semantics, data processing and e-infrastructure, identification and citation, cataloguing and provenance, and closed presenting two use cases on data management in the context of LifeWatch Italy.

15,000 scientists sign a Warning To Humanity

More than 15,000 scientitsts from about 180 countries have signed a Warning To Humanity against the consequences of our behaviour on the biosphere. The initiative, launched by William Ripple and published on Bioscience, aims at raising global attention on the need for a cultural and behavioural change in our growth and consumption patterns to avoid irreparably compromising the biosphere.

We are in fact in the twenty-fifth anniversary of a first call made by scientists in 1994, since then, with the exception of stabilising the stratospheric ozone layer, we, as global population, have not made enough for solving the environmental challenges stressed in the first call, and, even worse, most of these have become more and more critical over the years.

Alberto Basset, Ecologist at the University of Salento and founder of LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy, interviewed by the Italian newspaper Repubblica, said that “our first priority is spreading an ecological culture raising citizens’ awareness on the interdependence of our well-being and health with those of the other species with whom we share our territory. Scientific knowledge and conservation aand restoration policies are definitely relevant, but the key factor is our behaviour and our perception of the value of ecosystems”.

New Phyto VRE to be presented at 52nd EMBS

A dedicated LifeWatch Italy booth welcomes participants of the 52nd European Marine Biology Symposium (Piran, 25–29 September 2017) and guiding them to discover the first demonstration of the Phyto Virtual Research Environment.

The Phyto VRE, one of the components of the Marine VRE, is a web collaborative working environment addressing researchers’ needs in terms of accessibility, interoperability and integration on the large heterogeneous and distributed data on phytoplankton.

Thanks to three main tools, the Atlas of Phytoplankton, Atlas of Shapes, Phytoplankton Traits Thesaurus, users will be able to obtain and share harmonised data on taxonomy and morpho-functional traits, discover, access, integrate and export both own and others’ datasets, share and capture workflows, models, algorithms, online services and scientific results by orchestrators, all working collaboratively and simultaneously overcoming limitations of traditional working practices and boundaries.

Moreover, the Phyto VRE, like all LifeWatch ERIC’s virtual research environments, will be expandable with more services and tools designed on the basis of researchers’ necessities.

Come and visit us at our stand and follow the oral communication “Phytoplankton morphological and demographic traits computation in a virtual research environment Phyto VRE”*, given by Dr Elena Stanca on 26 September 2017, at 12:15.

* Elena Stanca, Leonilde Roselli, Francesco Cozzoli, Ilaria Rosati, Nicola Fiore and Alberto Basset, “Phytoplankton morphological and demographic traits computation in a virtual research environment Phyto VRE”

Interim Executive Board Meeting

Form 26 – 29 June 2017, the Interim Executive Board of LifeWatch ERIC took place in Melpignano, Lecce, in the magnificent and recently renovated Palazzo Marchesale.

The meeting, hosted by the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre, thanks to the support of the Town of Melpignano, was the first operative session of the infrastructure, after the I General Assembly held in Seville. Representatives from Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece and, obviously, Italy, had been meeting for four days to draft the strategical lines of the operative construction of the infrastructure, based on the valorisation of what already produced in the course of the preparatory phase.

2018 International Summer School on “Data Management in Environmental and Earth Science Infrastructures”

Between the 9 –13 July, around 40 academics, researchers, PhD students, data managers and research infrastructure developers coming from all across Europe gathered in Lecce, to join the International Summer School on “Data Management in Environmental and Earth Science Infrastructures: theory and practice”, organised by the H2020 ENVRIplus and LifeWatch Service Centre.

In recent years, one of the major challenges in environmental and earth science has been managing and using continuously growing volumes of data collected across multiple disciplines, and educating both scientists and developers on how best to do so. Many different standards, approaches, and tools have now been developed to support the research data lifecycle, which need to be examined and, where appropriate, adopted by a wider community. In particular, modern semantic technologies provide a promising way to properly describe and interrelate different data sources in ways that reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among environmental and ecological resources and the researchers who use them.

To address these challenges, ENVRIplus and the LifeWatch Service Centre organised a five-day summer school providing an unique insight into the contemporary debate on data management in the environmental and earth sciences. The programme, combining theory with hands-on sessions, explored themes as diverse as reference modelling and research metadata semantics, data processing and e-infrastructure, identification and citation, cataloguing and provenance, and closed presenting two use cases on data management in the context of LifeWatch Italy.

“Both ENVRIplus and the LifeWatch Service Centre have been working on these topics and have already organised dedicated workshops and training sessions in recent years.” say the organisers, Nicola Fiore (LifeWatch Service Centre) and Zhiming Zhao (ENVRIplus). “This year we decided to move forward and propose a full International Summer School; its participants were enthusiastic about the programme and so we are already at work on a 2019 edition”.

Welcome, LifeWatch ERIC!

Deepening biodiversity and ecosystem related issues has become a crucial value in contemporary society, which is tackling global scale challenges on capital elements, such as resource supply, economic development, environmental security and human well-being. The European Commission recognises research in this area as a priority, moving further from the punctual programmes funding the many fixed-term projects, to the institution of a European Research Infrastructure Consortium, as a long term strategy to ensure sustainability of research. Welcome, LifeWatch ERIC!

LifeWatch ERIC is the 14th European research infrastructure to be granted this important status, and it is composed by eight founding member states and three common facilities. Through the use of the ICT, the infrastructure guarantees the access to big sets of data on biodiversity, ensuring their standardisation and interoperability, and providing researchers and institutions with tools and services allowing the creation of customised virtual research environments, supporting policy making.

Italy, through its Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) and its National Research Council (CNR), plays a key role in LifeWatch ERIC, hosting its Service Centre, one of the three common facilities, at the University of Salento, and contributing with its e-Biodiversity Research Institute, powered by a Joint Research Unit counting more than 30 among top level universities, national institutes, regional agencies and academies of the country.

On 8 and 9  May 2017, the first General Assembly of LifeWatch ERIC took place in Seville (Spain), and elected the interim members of the statutory bodies which will manage the Consortium until the formal ones will be appointed. Prof. Alberto Basset has been named interim Director of the Service Centre and interim Member of the Executive Board.

On 23 May 2017, European Commission Director-General for Research & Innovation, Robert Jan-Smits, awarded the LifeWatch ERIC Plate to the Spanish Secretary of State for Research, Development & Innovation, Carmen Vela, who received it on behalf of the entire LifeWatch ERIC community.

Welcome, LifeWatch ERIC!

To see the LifeWatch ERIC statutes, please click here.

You can find the Communication of the European Commission here.