Following the successful ALL-Ready regional workshop held in its ICT-Core premises in Seville at the start of the month, LifeWatch ERIC played an active part in the project’s 3rd Pilot Network Meeting. The meeting took place in Budapest (Hungary) from 21 – 23 November 2022, organised by the Hungarian Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (ÖMKi). ALL-Ready is a European Commission-funded HORIZON2020 project addressing the multiple challenges that agricultural systems are facing today, including climate change, biodiversity loss, dwindling resources, and degradation of soil and water quality.
During the meeting, LifeWatch ERIC presented the Agroecology Virtual Lab for Living Labs and Research Infrastructure as a key e-tool to boost the acceleration of the Agroecology transition in the EU, by promoting networking and interaction among the Agroecology community. A training session was also given to the pilot members of the network to test the performance of the first version of the application.
LifeWatch ERIC Agroecology Virtual Lab provides seamless access to all services that the Agroecology community might need (e.g., data collection, sharing and visualisation) to collaborate and co-create new knowledge. These different functionalities will not only allow the community to work with data in a more efficient way, but boost innovative collaboration pathways between Agroecology stakeholders (Living Labs, Research Infrastructures, end-users, policy-makers, citizens, etc.).
To learn more about different projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please visit the Related Projects page.
LifeWatch ERIC is hosting a hybrid regional workshop on 2 November for the ALL-Ready Project, at its ICT-Core office in Seville, located in the Cartuja Science and Technology Park. It will be attended by the project partners and more than 50 experts from Spain, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria and Italy, of which 50% of the attendees are members of the Andalusian agricultural and agri-food sectors. Presenting will be Consolación Vera, General Secretary of Agriculture, Livestock and Food of the Junta de Andalucía, and José Carlos Álvarez, Managing Director of AGAPA, the Andalusian Agricultural and Fisheries Management Agency, alongside representatives of workshop organisers LifeWatch ERIC (Juan Miguel González-Aranda, CTO) and INRAE (Heather McKhann, Muriel Mambrini-Doudet). The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development of the Junta de Andalucía and its organic farming working group are also collaborating in the organisation of the event, to involve the Andalusian community of farmers (through the SmartFood project). They will present as a success story their experience promoting and stimulating the creation of Living Labs in Agroecology to enhance the presence of Andalusian farmers in the European Association. More information on the workshop and attendees here.
The important news from this Horizon2020 project is that the European Commission, through Horizon Europe, is designing the European Association to Accelerate the Transition of Agricultural Systems through Living Labs (collaborative workspaces) and Research Infrastructures in Agroecology, formed of the ALL-Ready project consortium and the experts in attendance at the workshop. The aim is over the next seven years to mobilise more than 500 million euros in order to bring the green and digital revolution to fruition in the agricultural sector, in line with the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy, the European Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the UN SDGs. At the workshop, the participants will work together to propose the focus, maturity and financing of their initiatives, taking into account the practices and values of ALL-Ready, to define their respective roles in the network. Another goal is to boost the participation of local agents from Southern Europe in the initiatives that will be organised by the Association.
For its part, LifeWatch ERIC has been designated by the European Commission as the Reference Research Infrastructure for the management of knowledge, data and infrastructure of Information Technology Association, and to help contribute to a green and digital revolution across Europe. To this end, the infrastructure is developing an innovative Virtual Research Environment based on its Tesseract and LifeBlock (which uses Blockchain) platforms, which will support the tokenisation of ecosystem services to enable ecosystem monitoring and tracking and CAP schemes based on agroecological practices and low-carbon agriculture. These developments carried out from Andalusia through its AstarteWatch network will be duly federated at a pan-European level through the LifeWatch ERIC e-Infrastructure.
In the two days following the regional workshop on 2 November, the ALL-Ready Annual Meeting morning will take place between the 13 entities of the project consortium, hosted by LifeWatch ERIC. Together, they will analyse the achievements made in the first phases of the project, define and plan the next steps, organise the growing involvement of all sectors linked to agroecology and model the training courses that contribute to systematising the legacy of this project and its continuity.
To learn more about the projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please see the Related Projects page.
The Horizon 2020 – funded Project BiCIKL, in which LifeWatch ERIC is a partner, has reached its halfway stage. The partners gathered in Plovdiv(Bulgaria) from 22 – 25 October for the Second General Assembly, brilliantly organised by Pensoft Publishers.
The BiCIKL project will launch a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in the biodiversity and life sciences based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services. BiCIKL’s goal is to create a centralised place to connect all key biodiversity data by interlinking 15 research infrastructures and their databases. The 3-year European Commission-supported initiative kicked off in 2021 and involves 14 key natural history institutions from 10 European countries.
BiCIKL is keeping pace as expected (16 out of 48 deliverables have been submitted, 9 are in progress/under review and due in a few days, 21 out of 48 milestones have been achieved).
The hybrid format of the meeting enabled a wider range of participants, which resulted in robust discussions on the next steps of the project, such as the implementation of additional technical features of the FAIR Data Place (FAIR being an abbreviation for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This online platform – the key and final product of the partnership and the BiCIKL initiative – is meant to provide scientists with all types of biodiversity data “at their fingertips”.
This data includes information, such as detailed images, DNA, physiology and past studies concerning a specific species and its ‘relatives’, to name a few. Currently, the issue is that all those types of biodiversity data have so far been scattered across various databases, which in turn have been missing meaningful and efficient interconnectedness.
Additionally, the FAIR Data Place, developed within the BiCIKL project, is to give researchers access to plenty of training modules to guide them through the different services.
Halfway through the duration of BiCIKL, the project is at a turning point, where crucial discussions between the partners are playing a central role in the refinement of the FAIR Data Place design. Most importantly, they are tasked with ensuring that their technologies work efficiently with each other, in order to seamlessly exchange, update and share the biodiversity data every one of them is collecting and taking care of.
By Year 3 of the BiCIKL project, the partners agree, when those infrastructures and databases become efficiently interconnected to each other, scientists studying the Earth’s biodiversity across the world will be in a much better position to build on existing research and improve the way and the pace at which nature is being explored and understood. At the end of the day, knowledge is the stepping stone for the preservation of biodiversity and humankind itself.
“Needless to say, it’s an honour and a pleasure to be the coordinator of such an amazing team spanning as many as 14 partnering natural history and biodiversity research institutions from across Europe, but also involving many global long-year collaborators and their infrastructures, such as Wikidata, GBIF, TDWG, Catalogue of Life to name a few. I see our meeting in Plovdiv as a practical demonstration of our eagerness and commitment to tackle the long-standing and technically complex challenge of breaking down the silos in the biodiversity data domain. It is time to start building freeways between all biodiversity data, across (digital) space, time and data types. After the last three days that we spent together in inspirational and productive discussions, I am as confident as ever that we are close to providing scientists with much more straightforward routes to not only generate more biodiversity data, but also build on the already existing knowledge to form new hypotheses and information ready to use by decision- and policy-makers. One cannot stress enough how important the role of biodiversity data is in preserving life on Earth. These data are indeed the groundwork for all that we know about the natural world” – said BiCIKL’s project coordinator Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft, a scholarly publisher and technology provider company.
“The point is: do we want an integrated structure or do we prefer federated structures?” – says Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC – “What are the pros and cons of the two options? It’s essential to keep the community united and allied because we can’t afford any information loss and the stakeholders should feel at home with the Project and the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub.”
“We are a brand new community, and we are in the middle of the growth process” – says Joe Miller, GBIF– “We would like to already have answers, but it’s good to have this kind of robust discussion to build on a good basis. We must find the best solution to have linkages between infrastructures and be able to maintain them in the future because the BKH is the location to gather the community around best practices, data and guidelines on how to use the BiCIKL services… In order to engage even more partners to fill the eventual gaps in our knowledge.”
“BiCIKL is leading data infrastructure communities through some exciting and important developments”, says Guy Cochrane, EMBL-EBI. “In an era of biodiversity change and loss, leveraging scientific data fully will allow the world to catalogue what we have now, to track and understand how things are changing and to build the tools that we will use to conserve or remediate. The challenge is that the data come from many streams – molecular biology, taxonomy, natural history collections, biodiversity observation – that need to be connected and intersected to allow scientists and others to ask real questions about the data. In its first year, BiCIKL has made some key advances to rise to this challenge.”
“As a partner, we, at Biodiversity Information Standards – TDWG, are very enthusiastic that our standards are implemented in BiCIKL and serve to link biodiversity data. We know that joining forces and working together is crucial to building efficient infrastructures and sharing knowledge”, says Deborah Paul, chair of the Biodiversity Information Standards-TDWG.
The project will go on with the first Round Table of experts in December and the publications of the projects who participated in the Open Call and will be founded (https://bicikl-project.eu/open-call-projects) at the beginning of the next year.
To learn more about projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please visit our Related Projects page.
IBERGRID 2022, the 11th Iberian Grid Conference, took place 10–13 October at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal. IBERGRID stands for the Iberian Grid Structure, federating computing and data resources across the Iberian area to support research and innovation. The theme of the conference was “Delivering Innovative Computing and Data Services for Research”, and LifeWatch ERIC had a strong presence at the event, with a presentation “EOSC Activities in the Environmental Sciences” from ICT-Core e-Infrastructure Operations Coordinator Antonio José Sáenz on behalf of CEO Christos Arvanitidis and CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda, as part of the EOSC tripartite event which took place on day 1, and a two-part workshop on “IBERLifeWatch” – focusing on a good practices approach for scientific, technology and innovation communities and on funding opportunities for Spanish-Portuguese cooperation on day 2 and day 4.
LifeWatch ERIC would like to thank event organisers University of Algarve, LIP, INCD and CSIC. The Iberian Peninsula is a biodiversity hotspot and it is key that synergistic initiatives and projects such as those mentioned during the meeting are maintained and expanded, and IBERGRID 2022 provided the perfect opportunity to acknowledge and reinforce cross-border collaboration.
To see photos from the event, please see our gallery.
Presentations from the IBERLifeWatch workshop are available below:
MARBEFES (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services) is the latest of LifeWatch ERIC’s related projects to launch, with the kick-off meeting taking place from 4–6 October in Sopot, Poland. The ambitious Horizon Europe project aims to evaluate and characterise the links between marine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services and the resulting societal goods and benefits in coastal communities. The results will be captured in easy-to-use tools to help practitioners and policy to maximise the ecological value and optimise a sustainable socio-economic use of the marine system for current and future generations.
Representatives from all the MARBEFES project partners gathered in Sopot for a three-day kick-off meeting, involving general presentations of the project goals and expected results, including an overview of all the project Work Packages (WPs). On the first day of the meeting, as part of the general presentation of the project, LifeWatch ERIC CEO Christos Arvanitidis and International Initiatives & Projects Manager Cristina Huertas-Olivares illustrated LifeWatch ERIC’s leading role in in WP5 “Integration & Scenario”. The KOM also involved working group sessions to detail project partners’ involvement and interrelations between WPs to smooth further activities.
You can follow the MARBEFES project on Facebook and Twitter.
To learn more about the projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please visit our Related Projects page.
From 28–30 September, LifeWatch ERIC hosted a Consortium Meeting of the Horizon2020 project, EOSC Future, at la Casa de la Ciencia, in Seville. At 18 months into the project, the meeting served to review its execution thus far, as well as the next steps to be followed. All the consortium partners were represented, with 71 people attending in person and about 30 online. On the first day, the morning was dedicated to “WP6: Integration of Community Services and Products into EOSC”, which is led by LifeWatch ERIC, and involves the demonstration of EOSC value through Cross-domain Research Science Projects (10 Science Projects are involved in this WP) which will mobilise the research communities for widespread the use of EOSC resources.
Read more about the project’s ambitions:
EOSC Future will build on the existing baseline for the European Open Science Cloud to deliver a platform with a durable set of user-friendly components that are designed for the long haul. It will adopt a system-of-systems approach to the EOSC platform, linking together other research portals, resources and services to respond to the data needs of a wide range of researchers.
One way to think about EOSC is as a fully operational web of data and related services founded on FAIR protocols, principles and standards for accessing interoperable datasets. In practice, EOSC Future will work with key stakeholders to ensure a smooth user experience, developing:
EOSC core, the set of enabling services needed to operate the EOSC
EOSC exchange registering resources and services from research infrastructures, other EOSC projects and science clusters to the EOSC and integrating them with the EOSC core functionalities
the EOSC interoperability framework will provide guidelines for providers that want to integrate services or data into EOSC
EOSC Future will engage with users throughout the different development stages to make sure the EOSC matches researchers’ needs and is intuitive. It will also provide support and training to make sure users can make the most of the EOSC platform.
To learn more about the projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please visit our Related Projects page.
As with every year, LifeWatch ERIC is taking part in the annual Smart Agrifood Summit, Europe’s largest agrifood innovation and digitisation event, which is taking place this year from 29 – 30 September in Malaga, Spain. Attended by 3000 participants, 300 speakers, 200 start-ups and with over 50 countries represented, LifeWatch ERIC is in the perfect place to find and consolidate synergies; dozens of corporations, companies and entities highly involved in agrifood innovation and sustainability, such as Cajamar ADNAgroFood, held productive meetings with the infrastructure at its stand.
Notably at the event, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer, presented “SmartfoodLifeWatch”, alongside José Manuel Ávila-Castuera, Rocío Moreno Domínguez and Daniel Caro Gómez. It is an initiative which measures the impact of agricultural, forestry and fishing activities on Andalusia’s biodiversity, powered in collaboration with the Andalusian Agrarian and Fisheries Management Agency (AGAPA) and researchers from the University of Cordoba.
The Indalo project was also presented at the Summit, which is coordinated with the Andalusian Institute for Research and Training in Agriculture, Food Fisheries and Ecological Production (IFAPA). This initiative studies Andalusian agricultural and fishing ecosystems through the creation of a network of observatories to monitor the impact of climate change and biodiversity. There are eight key focus ecosystems: olive groves, dried fruits, extensive herbaceous crops, intensive horticulture, red fruits, agriculture in the Lower Guadalquivir, dehesa and fishing reserves in the Guadalquivir. The network of observatories will be equipped with state-of-the-art measurement equipment, allowing real-time access to the information obtained by the sensors.
LifeWatch ERIC is pleased to announce that it is involved as a partner in a new, EU-funded research project called MarineSABRES. The project aims to address the continued and accelerated biodiversity loss caused by the intensification of human activities at land and sea. The project — coordinated by MaREI, the SFI Centre for Energy, Climate, and Marine Research at University College Cork — will bring together an international consortium of 22 partners across 11 countries and will receive €9.8m in funding from Horizon Europe, the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation. Running for four years, MarineSABRES aims to enable stakeholders from government and policy, coastal and marine management, scientists, and the public to make informed decisions that balance human and ecosystem needs.
To set European marine management on a course to reverse biodiversity decline, MarineSABRES will bring together diverse audiences and perspectives to co-design a simple Socio-Ecological System (SES) framework. The aim of this approach is to strengthen interventions and measures for the protection and conservation of coastal and marine areas and improve the uptake of ecosystem-based management. The Simple SES will be tested in three areas: the Tuscan Archipelago, where research will focus on seagrass conservation and protection; the Arctic (Greenland, the Faroes, and Iceland), where work will address climate change and fisheries; and Macaronesia (Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries), where the emphasis will be on biodiversity conservation and the responsible use of the region for multiple maritime activities.
The coming decade will be critical in meeting the challenge of climate change, reversing trends in biodiversity loss, and developing a sustainable ocean economy. Effective marine environmental management and biodiversity protection are fundamental to achieving the transformation to a modern, resource-efficient, and competitive low-carbon sustainable ocean economy. MarineSABRES’ Simple SES approach aims to show how we can protect and maintain the natural structure and processes of marine ecosystems while simultaneously delivering the societal goods and benefits that people rely on. Successful development of this Simple SES will enable managers to make sustainable decisions; empower citizens to engage with marine biodiversity conservation; promote sustainable development in coastal and marine sectors and setting European marine management on a course to reverse biodiversity decline.
Andalusia, the region home to the LifeWatch ERIC Statutory Seat and ICT-Core, drives the innovative Smartfood Project in the agricultural and fishing sectors. SmartFood is led by the Andalusia Agency for Agriculture and Fisheries Development (AGAPA), which is part of the Junta de Andalucía, and its aim is to better understand the impact of agriculture on the region’s biodiversity. On Monday 18 July, in Cordoba, a project event was held in which a balloon sensor probe was released, attended by LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Project Coordinator, Rocío Moreno Domínguez, Direction Secretary and QARM/FitSM Technical Assistant, María Luz Vázquez Santana, and Satellite & HAPS Operations Manager for Earth Observations and Navigation Applications, Jaime Lobo.
The first flight of the balloon sensor probe took place on Cordoba University Campus, called ‘Rabanales’, with the principal aim of gathering data on the agricultural impact on a natural environment, as well as identifying and quantifying variables associated with ecosystem services in the agricultural sector.
AGAPA Director, José Carlos Álvarez Martín, commented on the importance of governamental institutions like Junta de Andalucía supporting projects as Smartfood, given the strategic importance of the agriculture and fishing sectors.
In the same vein, Dr Arvanitidis noted that the Andalusian region is a strategic European partner, due to its agricultural potential and natural protected areas becoming a hotspot for the development of these kinds of projects.
Finally, Dr González-Aranda highlighted that these types of projects are essential for sustainability development and innovation, so that we can measure the impact of climate change in order to advise better decision-making based on FAIR data. He also mentioned the importance of optimising existing distributed resources by improving our understanding of their associated ecosystem services.
This week, LifeWatch ERIC personnel Juan Miguel González-Aranda (CTO), Maria Luz Vázquez (Direction Secretary & QARM – FiTSM Technical Assistant for ICT-Core), Rocío Moreno (Project Executive Coordinator) and Cristina Huertas Olivares (International Initiatives & Projects Manager) are in Montevideo, Uruguay, for the second General Assembly of ResInfra EU-LAC.
The ResInfra EU-LAC project pursues the construction of bi-regional collaboration between European Union and the LAC countries (Latin America and the Caribbean), and the meeting has gathered representatives from Uruguay and the European Commission as well as partners of the EU-LAC ResInfra Consortium to discuss items such as the project Sustainability Plan, the benefits of Research Infrastructure cooperation, and the next Horizon Europe INFRA work programme. On 20 July, LifeWatch ERIC CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda gave a presentation on the “LifEuLAC pilot on Biodiversity and Climate Change.”
To learn more about the projects LifeWatch ERIC is involved in, please visit our Related Projects page.
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End of May 2026 – Policy-brief to demonstrate the application of habitat-based mapping in supporting EU strategies (e.g., Biodiversity Strategy, Nature Restoration Law).
Mapping user requirements
End of January 2025 – Catalogue of services already available in LifeWatch ERIC or research lines addressing ecological responses to climate change;
February 2025 (TBD) – Online working table on setting priorities, timeline and milestones for the mapping service and model requirements by scientists and science stakeholders.
Greece
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.
End of January 2025 – Internal distribution of a questionnaire on the most used/relevant model resources in the WG member research activity;
February 2025 (TBD) – Online working table on setting priorities, timeline and milestones for the mapping service and model requirements by scientists and science stakeholders.
Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building
End of December 2025 – Create a shared repository of guidance documents, tools, templates, and data resources accessible to WG members and broader communities.
Organising WG workshops and conferences
End of January 2025 – Setting priority research lines and contributions to the BEeS 2025 LifeWatch Conference for the session on the “Ecological responses to climate change”;
March/April 2025 (TBD) – Workshop ‘Ecological modelling and eco-informatics to address functional responses of biodiversity and ecosystems to climate change’ co-organised with the University of Salento;
30 June – 3 July 2025 – Participation to LifeWatch 2025 BEeS Conference on “Addressing the Triple Planetary Crisis”.
Fund raising
End of January 2025 – Establishing a WG Committee on scouting project application opportunities and fundraising.
Meetings, Webinars, International Conferences & Networking (2025/2026)
Organising and participating at discussions on emerging technologies in biodiversity monitoring;
Organising webinars on machine learning, eDNA analysis, and automated data collection;
Fostering collaboration between researchers, technologists, and decision-makers.
Collaborative Research & Case Studies (2025/2026)
Conducting pilot projects to test new monitoring methods;
Publishing scientific and popular science papers and reports on advancements in biodiversity assessment.
Data Standardisation & FAIR Principles Implementation (2025/2026)
Developing best practices for data curation and sharing;
Ensuring that biodiversity data aligns with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) standards.
Development of VREs for Ecosystem Simulation (2026)
Creating virtual models of ecosystems to predict environmental changes;
Enhancing conservation strategies through AI-driven simulations.
Mapping Requirements and Gap Analysis
End of December 2025 – Catalogue of services already available in LifeWatch ERIC or research lines Ecosystem services mapping.
Methodological Alignment and Innovation
End of January 2026 – Online working table on mapping standards, classification systems, and indicators across members;
End of January 2026 – Catalogue of advanced techniques (e.g., remote sensing, GIS modelling, and machine learning) for scalable, habitat-based ecosystem service mapping;
End December 2026 – Methodological framework to support methodological innovation through joint development and testing of mapping approaches, especially linking ecosystem service supply and demand.
Belgium
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.
