LifeWatch ERIC Appoints Gender Expert to Assist its Work for Equality in Research

Gender Equality in Research

Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC CEO, has announced today the appointment of a social scientist and gender expert, Africa G Zanella, to take up the role of advising and directing the infrastructure’s strategy, policies and programmes from a gender-equality perspective.

“LifeWatch ERIC is committed to seeing gender balance not only within the organisation, but also in line with European Union guidelines for Research Institutions regarding diversity and inclusion in research projects funded under ERDF,” said the CEO.

Zanella will design and implement a Gender Equality Plan which will be available to all stakeholders including researchers, staff, allies and the LifeWatch ERIC international community,  to create an equitable and sustainable environment for all at work. The plan will develop a cohesive front of human capital in LifeWatch ERIC’s quest to develop innovative research tools and systems for biodiversity and ecosystem scientists, to make a social, economic and environmental difference.

Zanella is an innovative thinker and challenges traditional approaches to problem solving. She has been appointed to the World Bank Climate Investment Fund for the 2021-23 period as a Civil Society Observer and is an accredited expert in Women’s Empowerment, Economic Growth and Green Industry for the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). She has special skills in the alignment of SDG 5 (Equality) with relevant SDGs to ensure that women play an important role in economic and social development and contribute to the wellbeing and survival of people and the planet. She hopes to be able to establish a transformative change that will see high-quality researchers from diverse backgrounds participate with LifeWatch ERIC in its mission and vision. 

Zanella was born in Spain and has lived and worked in Australia most of her life, where she has a distinguished career in international relations and sustainability. She can be contacted at gender@lifewatch.eu.

Mapping Eel Migration Routes

Mapping Eel Migration Routes

This story was originally posted on LifeWatch Belgium.

With the use of 96 data loggers, scientists of the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), Ghent University and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) succeeded in mapping the migration routes of eels in the North Sea. The results show that the majority of Belgian eels migrate through the English Channel. Although this seems the logical thing to do, some choose to migrate over Scotland. The reason for these different choices is still under study; the eels are probably guided by certain sea currents.

The European eel has one of the most impressive and complex life cycles in the animal kingdom. They grow in our rivers, but need to migrate at least 7000 m to the spawning grounds in the Atlantic Ocean. The exact location of and the migration routes to these spawning grounds are after millennia of research still poorly known.

Researchers from the INBO, Ghent University and VLIZ attached data logging devices to eels to map their migration routes in the North Sea. Pieterjan Verhelst from the INBO: “These data logging devices measure water temperature and depth during the eel’s migration route. After some time, the devices detach from the eel, drift to the sea surface and hopefully wash ashore. Whoever found such a device and sent it back to us was awarded €50. As such, we could download the data and calculate the eel’s trajectory.”

Successful findings
From the 320 deployed data loggers 96 (30%) were retrieved. The majority were found near the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel (France), but substantial numbers were also retrieved along the southern coasts of the UK and the Netherlands.

Whales and sharks
The route was not without danger. Marine predators like whales and sharks ate eleven of our eels. In some cases we were even able to identify the culprit to species level (a pilot whale and a porbeagle shark) based on the species-specific body temperature (after predation the data logger was inside the predator) and the diving pattern.

Bit by bit
Although we couldn’t track the eels until their spawning locations, these results are a valuable contribution to the already known routes (for example the route from Norway over the UK and the route through the Mediterranean Sea). Putting the pieces of the puzzle together on one map, we gradually get a total picture of the various eel migration routes. The final 3000 km to the spawning sites, however, is still shrouded in mystery and require further research.

For more info, contact Pieterjan Verhelst (Research Institute for Nature and Forest)

LifeWatch ERIC at the 2022 ERIC Forum Annual Meeting

ERIC Forum Annual Meeting

Today, 26 January 2022, LifeWatch ERIC CTO Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda participated in the ERIC Forum Annual Meeting. During the event, Dr González-Aranda presented the “Technical and Innovation Report on the integration of ERICs into pan-European infrastructures – The example of EOSC” on behalf of his co-authors, Dr Cristina Huertas Olivares and Dr Christos Arvanitidis of LifeWatch ERIC.

The report was produced in the context of the ERIC FORUM H2020 Project, forming part of Work Package 6: “The Role of ERICs in European science policy and research strategy”. It presents a review on the integration of ERIC development into pan-European infrastructures, particularly regarding the new EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). 

In the first chapter, which describes Research Infrastructures (RI) and RI clusters, the reader is introduced to the rationale for their cooperation and collaboration in using EOSC resources: it achieves a degree of integration of their basic assets (e.g. data and information). The following chapter reflects on the efforts that have been made to establish EOSC in the past, describing key players along with current prospects. These chapters are followed by key conclusions and some recommendations for the enhancement of this ongoing integration process.

The ERIC Forum Annual Meeting will continue tomorrow, 27 January, in order for members to discuss the practical aspects of future collaboration between ERICs. 

ASSEMBLE+ Project Opens Call

Assemble Plus Call

Until 13 February 2022, researchers from industry and academia can apply for free access to top-class marine research infrastructures, thanks to the opening of the ninth call of the ASSEMBLE Plus project (Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories Expanded).

 ASSEMBLE Plus offers access to over 32 marine stations and institutes in 13 countries across Europe and overseas for basic and applied research in the marine science field (see overleaf). Researchers from both industry and academia can apply for on-site and remote access. Sponsorship includes travel and subsistence for two persons (one return trip per person, up to 30 days). Successful applicants will be able to carry out their project free-of-charge (subject to some limitations).

Please visit assembleplus.eu for updates on available services, call dates, application procedures and any further information on current and upcoming calls for access.

EOSC Future ‘Ask Me Anything’ Webinars

EOSC Future Webinars

Starting in February 2022, EOSC Future (one of the projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is currently involved) will organise ‘ask me anything’ webinars.

On the first Tuesday of every month, participants will have the chance to ask questions about a variety of EOSC services and resources.

During these exclusive Q&A sessions, resources and resource categories available on the EOSC platform will be presented, discussed and, in some cases, tested out.

Each session will take place online from 14.00-15.00 CET. 

The first 3 webinars are listed below:

  • 01/02/2022: Data storage
  • 01/03/2022: Software 
  • 05/04/2022: Compute services

Have a question about another EOSC service that is not listed above? More dates and topics are coming throughout 2022-2023. Eventually, the webinars will cover all resource categories on the EOSC portal.

Ask me anything about…

The EOSC Future ‘ask me anything’ webinars aim to encourage uptake among users as well as show potential service providers how their resources could be featured through EOSC.

For each session, EOSC community members, experts and project coordinators will present an EOSC resource. As needed, there will be a demonstrative use case to show how a specific type of resource can be accessed and used via the platform. For all webinars, particular emphasis will be placed on answering any and all questions from the audience.

Registration

Register for specific sessions by following the links below:

Visit the EOSC Future website for updates on upcoming webinar topics and dates.

LifeWatch ERIC at the EU – Russian Federation Symposium on Research Infrastructures

Symposium on RIs

On Friday, 17 December, LifeWatch ERIC CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda gave a presentation at the EU – Russian Federation Symposium on Research Infrastructures (RIs). The virtual symposium brought together delegates from Russian and European RIs, active in various scientific domains, to raise awareness of the broad array of scientific opportunities offered to scientists and for RI cooperation in Europe and in the Russian Federation.

In his presentation, “Fostering EU-Russian Federation e-Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Sustainable Services provision and Conservation Mechanisms, Together” which he gave on behalf of the LifeWatch ERIC Executive Board, Dr González-Aranda suggested reinforcing existing communities-of-practice between the blocs, as well as creating an “essential e-Research Collaboration middleware” to enhance their interoperability. He also spoke about the wealth of Russian biodiversity data already available on the GBIF, and how LifeWatch ERIC can support the strategy for Transition of the Russian Federation to the Model of Sustainability Development through the provision of FAIRness mechanisms, such as integration into the EOSC.

You can see the full agenda of the event here.

CREMLINplus (Connecting Russian and European Measures for Large-scale Research Infrastructures – plus) is an EU Horizon 2020 project fostering European-Russian scientific and technical collaboration in the field of research infrastructures (RIs).

RI-VIS project is an EU Horizon 2020 project designed to increase the visibility of European research infrastructures (RIs) to new communities in Europe and beyond.

New ESFRI Roadmap Launched

ESFRI Roadmap

 Αfter a two-year-long process of hard and meticulous work by a great number of scientists and ESFRI delegates, a new ESFRI Roadmap was published on 7 December 2021. ESFRI presented the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap on Large Scale Research Infrastructures during a half-day online conference, which you can watch here. For more information, please visit the Launch Event webpage. The ESFRI Roadmap contains probably the best European science facilities based on a thorough evaluation and selection procedure. It combines ESFRI Projects, which are new research infrastructures in progress towards implementation, and ESFRI Landmarks, successfully implemented Research Infrastructures. The document also describes the broader Landscape of research in Europe which is an important component to ESFRI methodology. 

The ESFRI Roadmap 2021 includes 11 new Research Infrastructure Projects and reports on the development of research infrastructures under the existing Roadmap. All previous ESFRI Roadmap updates proved to be very influential and provided useful strategic guidance for European Countries’ investments, which goes beyond the research infrastructure domain. The 2021 update also considers the merits of the Open science concept and highlights the quest to address global challenges, as reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One of the key aspects of ESFRI rests in ensuring that excellent scientists have access to Europe’s best Research Infrastructures, irrespective of borders. This requires truly pan-European collaboration and a global outlook. In this process, ESFRI has acquired immense and valuable experience which it is pleased to share across countries and research infrastructure projects.

Follow and Share Roadmap 2021 news on Twitter: #ESFRIRoadmap2021

Information taken from the ESFRI website.

LifeWatch ERIC in round table: “A Preview of the Role of Science at the EU-Africa Summit 2022”

EU-Africa Summit 2022

On 8–9 December 2021, AERAP Science (the Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Platform) hosted the round-table session “A preview on the Role of Science at the EU-Africa Summit 2022”, to consider the contribution of science to the priorities for the EU-Africa Summit on 17–18 February 2022 in Brussels. In his contribution, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO and ERIC Forum Executive Board Member, addressed the necessity of establishing an EU-AFRICA e-Biodiversity network, in order to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals regarding the sustainable provision of ecosystem services.

For more information on this event, please see the AERAP article.

Full participant list:

Orla Feely – Vice President for Research, Innovation & Impact (VPRII), University College Dublin, Ireland

Erik Hansalek – Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany

Racey Muchilwa – Head of Novartis, Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), Novartis, Kenya

Daan du Toit – Deputy Director-General: ICR, Department of Science and Innovation, South Africa

Maria Cristina Russo – Director for Global Approach and International Cooperation in R&I at European Commission, European Commission, Belgium

Mahama Ouedraogo – Director, Science and Technology Department, African Union Commission, Ethiopia

Shamila Nair-Bedouelle – Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, UNESCO, France

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon – Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHES), France

Juan Miguel González-Aranda – LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer & ERIC FORUM Executive Board Member

Michael Makanga – Director, European Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), Netherlands

Raham Rachdi – USPA, Paris

Rahel Belete – Kilimanjaro Innovation Hub, Ethiopia

Djime Adoum – Director General, Sahel Coalition, Chad

Bernd Halling – Head of Corporate Strategy, Bayer AG

Intisar Soghayroun – Minister, Ministry of Higher education and Scientific Research, Sudan

Space4Climate Action: LifeWatch ERIC at the World Space Forum

Space4Climate Action

Yesterday, during the second day of the 2021 World Space Forum “Space4Climate Action” organised by UNOOSA (the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, presented “Towards the establishment of a global e-Biodiversity network for Sustainable Development Goal accomplishment and Ecosystem Services provision”. Dr González-Aranda highlighted that humanity is bringing our life support system, the biosphere, to the point of collapse, proposing that to solve this situation we must deepen our current level of knowledge, move beyond the present fragmentation of science, and foster greater complementarity and synergy between disciplines. One of the ways to do this being the development of new trans-disciplinary paradigms and the building of synthetic knowledge, with the aim of boosting innovation and a great involvement of young scientists and civil society.

LifeWatch ERIC is Europe’s first line of response to the biodiversity emergency, applying state-of-the-art ICT (Remote Sensing, Big Data, HPC-Cloud-Edge Computing, Blockchain, AI-Machine Learning, IoT-Sensor Networks, etc.) and services to scientific Communities-of-Practice and research centres all over the world through its distributed e-Infrastructure. It engages with and interconnects Researchers, Technologists, Decision-makers, Environmental Managers, Companies, Entrepreneurs, and Citizen Scientists, helping these stakeholders to develop their activities into Virtual Research Environments (VREs). This demonstrates the added value which ICT brings to battling “The Big Five” significant causes of biodiversity loss (changing use of sea and land, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive non-native species), contributing significantly to the introduction of the appropriate measures to combat them. LifeWatch ERIC is particularly involved, for instance, in Aichi Target 9, regarding Non-indigenous and Invasive species.

These activities are being carried out in synergy with the UN SDGs (in particular, 15: Life on Land and 14: Life on Water), the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, the European Green Deal, and many more. This is in addition to the essential role of the forthcoming Global Europe instrument (as often cited in ongoing EU-CELAC and EU-African Union cooperation) in relation to indigenous knowledge. The recognition of the importance of indigenous knowledge in reversing biodiversity loss is further reflected in the recent creation of IKRI (the Indigenous Knowledge Research Infrastructure) where key outcomes are anticipated in cooperation with prominent stakeholders, including UNOOSA, ITU (The UN International Telecommunications Union) and LifeWatch ERIC.

You can see the full programme here.

LWGreece Research Infrastructure Data Services

Research Infrastructure Data Services

The Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) is working on the enhancement of the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure (LWGreece RI) Data Services. The purpose of these activities is to provide end-users with a user-friendly service, enabling them to search and access (meta)data from two sources, Micro-CT vLab and IPT MedOBIS.

The activities are divided into three major categories:

(a) design and implementation of facilities for harvesting data

(b) data modelling and semantic data transformation activities, and

(c) updates and enhancements of the Data Services of the LWGreece RI.

More details of these activities are given below:

A set of supporting services and tools have been designed and implemented, able to harvest resources from two databases: (a) the IPT MedOBIS database and (b) the Micro-CT vLab database. A harvesting mechanism has been implemented that exports information from the above-mentioned sources, which are subsequently transformed and added to LWGreece repositories (see point below). 

After harvesting data from the sources described above, they needed to be homogenised before depositing them in the repositories of the LWGreece infrastructure. To this end, a set of mappings was implemented, using X3ML Specification Language,[1] that describes the transition of the harvested resources from their original schemata, to a common target top-level ontology MarineTLO.[2] The result was a set of ontological-based descriptions regarding MarineTLO that were inserted into the LWGreece semantic repositories.

Several endpoints of the Data Services were updated, so that they can properly retrieve information from LWGreece semantic repositories. In addition, we have enhanced the services based on the findings and the updated modelling that emerged from the two new sources that were used (i.e., IPT MedOBIS, micro-CT vLab). 

It is worth mentioning that the Data Services (along with all the other available vLabs) is now available through the Metadata Catalogue of LifeWatch ERIC. Allowing this central catalogue to be machine-interoperable is necessary for the population of the catalogue, and implements the FAIR principles and EOSC-interoperability, promoted through ENVRI-FAIR WP9 and WP11.

[1] Marketakis, Y., Minadakis, N., Kondylakis, H., Konsolaki, K., Samaritakis, G., Theodoridou, M., Flouris, G. and Doerr, M., 2017. X3ML mapping framework for information integration in cultural heritage and beyond. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 18(4), pp. 301-319.

[2] Tzitzikas, Y., Allocca, C., Bekiari, C., Marketakis, Y., Fafalios, P., Doerr, M., Minadakis, N., Patkos, T. and Candela, L., 2016. Unifying heterogeneous and distributed information about marine species through the top level ontology MarineTLO. Program, 50(1), pp. 16-40.