Towards a cultural change | First LifeWatch ERIC Scientific Community Meeting

The Scientific Community Meeting held in Rome from 27 – 29 May 2019 was designed to bring together the wider LifeWatch ERIC scientific communities of researchers and developers to generate and advance the discussion of the most promising lines of scientific development. In the view of the conference coordinator, Alberto Basset, Interim Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce and Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento, the 3-day event hosted by the Italian National Research Council, leader of the Italian contribution to the infrastructure, “was a great success”.

A truly international event, the meeting boasted 150 participants from 12 different countries which, thanks to the contributions given by LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities and National Nodes (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain), delivered to its participants a rich programme featuring 20 plenary sessions and 40 presentations in working sessions. The Scientific Community Meeting was the first of its kind and ended in widespread positive feedback and calls for greater interdisciplinary cooperation.

The three days were structured around the three complimentary strands of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Theory, Marine Biodiversity & Ecosystem Functioning, and Data, Modelling & Supporting Disruptive Technologies. There was widespread appreciation of the e-Science capabilities that LifeWatch ERIC provides, and agreement that the architecture is flexible with a user-friendly interface.

Many technologies and innovative case studies were also on display: from remote sensor monitoring of fauna and flora populations, to collecting data on marine life. But beyond gizmos, the working groups ended up agreeing on the need for collaboration, to work across borders and to use metadata to create user stories that everyone can relate to, to create greater common understanding.

Over these three days in Rome, LifeWatch ERIC has moved closer to identifying major gaps in scientific knowledge that need to be addressed, has emphasised key societal challenges that biodiversity and ecosystem science are required to address, gathered indications of the services and VRE developments that user communities need, proposed innovative approaches, like the use of blockchain, and has identified the need to reinforce collaboration and trust. 

LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, closed proceedings by saying that the processes of life on this planet are complex; that we need complex infrastructures to model and understand that complexity, a task which no country can do alone; and that the scientific community has a responsibility to answer global concerns about climate change. He concluded, “We will use all our arsenal to integrate everything we have and try to give a synthetic knowledge to many more recipients, so we can make a proper response to society. All disciplines need to come together with open communication.”

You can find all of the presentations from the meeting on the minisite: www.lifewatch.eu/scientific-community-meeting

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.

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.

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.

Major progress on global biodiversity observation system

During a three day workshop in Germany scientists and technical and legal experts made great steps towards the development of a cooperative and global monitoring system for changes in biodiversity. The workshop, which was a breakthrough in global collaboration, was organised for the first time as part of the EU horizon 2020 project GLOBIS-B, coordinated by the University of Amsterdam.

The fast growing global human population and climate change drive environmental modifications which might lead to poverty, social unrest and wars. But which dimensions of the environment are changing most dramatically, where are these changes happening and what will be the consequences for biodiversity? At the workshop in Leipzig, Germany, biodiversity scientists, technical experts from research infrastructures and advisors for legal interoperability of data defined so called Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) to address these questions.  

Essential Biodiversity Variables

Like climate variables, EBVs are constructed from various sources of data and are the underlying variables to assess changes in biodiversity through time. They can be used to measure the achievement of targets like the Aichi targets set by the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), to protect the world from further loss of biodiversity, support sustainable use of natural resources and enhance benefits from these. The variables should be capable of measuring changes in species distributions and abundances, for any type of organism, for any given time and any given area. In doing so, the measurements play an important role in policy decisions and are critical to the future work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); a sister panel to the well-known Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

GLOBIS-B workshop

The workshop was organised as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project GLOBIS-B (“GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research”). GLOBIS-B supports research infrastructures active in  biodiversity and ecosystems research from Australia, Brazil, China, Europe, South Africa and the USA to cooperate with their expertise. The project is coordinated by the University of Amsterdam as part of the LifeWatch European research infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystems research.

“With this workshop we set the scene for a global harmonisation process”, says Daniel Kissling, scientific coordinator of GLOBIS-B. This will improve the harmonization of data collection and technical data management, and help to address legal complications and constraints. “EBVs require big datasets on where species live”, continues Kissling. These data come from all kinds of places and have all kinds of formats. It is not always trivial that this data is made openly available and free. “With this project and the workshop we make a great breakthrough in global collaboration among holders of biodiversity data. This will facilitate the processing of big data and making them available for societal use”, concludes Kissling.

The main outcomes of the workshop were:

  • The Living Planet Index will make over a quarter of a million data points freely available to be used in these measurements;
  • eBird, the largest data collection of bird distributions in the world, will focus on measuring the change in patterns of bird occurrences globally;
  • The Atlas of Living Australia together with the European LifeWatch capability will create a demonstrator proof-of-concept for the process of measuring and presenting an EBV;
  • Consensus on using the ‘Darwin Core Event’ (DWCe), a new technical standard for biological datasets;
  • The Wildlife Picture Index will make their publically available data (2.6 million records) now accessible through the Darwin Core Event.

In June 2016 the participants will gather again in Seville, Spain for a follow up and to write a widely endorsed paper with recommendations on how to build the EBV’s for species populations.

For reference:

GLOBIS-B is a 3 year project, funded by the European Commission with the goal to enhance global collaboration among research infrastructures. The aim is to contribute to the development of Essential Biodiversity Variables by using the available data and technical capacity in these research infrastructures across the world.

The project is coordinated by the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, as a leading partner in the European LifeWatch research infrastructure. Other European project partners are: Cardiff University United Kingdom, Gnubila France, Consiglio Nazionala delle Ricerche (CNR) Italy, Martin-Luther-University Halle Germany and the Universidad de Alcalá Spain. For more information, consult the website www.globis-b.eu or send an e-mail to j.l.konijn@uva.nl