LifeWatch ERIC in Bold New Horizon Europe Project: Biodiversity Digital Twin

BioDT Kick-off Meeting

This week, along with 22 other partners, LifeWatch ERIC took part in the kick-off meeting of a new Horizon Europe project which will help protect and restore biodiversity through the development of a digital twin prototype, in Espoo, Finland. Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) BioDT will provide a crucial infrastructure to drive long-term biodiversity research and facilitate science-driven policy and rapid-response actions to enforce current commitments to protecting biodiversity in the long term.

In the context of recent efforts supported by the European Commission for the development of digital twins to address multidisciplinary environmental and societal challenges, the consortium, led by the Finnish CSC – IT Center for Science, home of the EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer, is taking on the task of designing and developing a digital twin dedicated to biological diversity in the BioDT project.

“CSC is pleased to support this flagship project, with BioDT being one of the first European-wide research initiatives to benefit from access to the LUMI supercomputer”, said Jesse Harrison, BioDT Project Manager. “BioDT will directly improve our ability to address global challenges associated with biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, including the provision of ecosystem services and food security, predicting disease outbreaks, and understanding the dynamics of key species of policy concern.”  

Redefining the ability to predict biodiversity dynamics

Understanding the forces shaping biodiversity is needed for rational management of natural resources and also to meet the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 to restore biodiversity in Europe. In particular, researchers need to be able to better predict global biodiversity dynamics and how species interact with their environment and with each other. This can be an extremely difficult task because the processes underlying biodiversity dynamics are complex. Innovative ways to combine data, models and interaction processes are required to predict these dynamics and offer solutions that promote a sustainable management of Earth’s biodiversity and its ecosystems.

The consortium aims to push the current boundaries of predictive understanding of biodiversity dynamics by developing a Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) providing advanced modelling, simulation and prediction capabilities. By exploiting existing technologies and data from relevant research infrastructures in new ways, BioDT will be able to accurately and quantitatively model interactions between species and their environment. 

Scientists at involved Research Infrastructures (RIs) will use the BioDT to:

  • better observe changes in biodiversity in response to forces resulting from climate change or human activity,
  • mechanistically understand how these changes occur,
  • predict the effects of these changes.

Practical examples and societal impact

The project features eight use cases related to land ecosystems, clustered in four groups grounded in the scientific and technical expertise of the consortium. These use cases focus on the species and ecosystems of highest conservation and policy concern, such as threatened species, pollinators, and grasslands, and are vital to mankind’s well-being and biodiversity conservation efforts.

  • Group 1 – Species response to environmental change
  • Group 2 – Genetically detected biodiversity
  • Group 3 – Dynamics and threats from and for species of policy concern
  • Group 4 – Species interactions with each other and with humans

They address global issues of critical societal interest including climate change impacts on species and ecosystems, food security, implementation of EU and international policies and health, and will specifically contribute to addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2 – Zero hunger, 3 – Good health and well-being, 13 – Climate action, and 15 – Life on land.

Multidisciplinary data for interconnected challenges

BioDT brings together a dynamic team of experts in biodiversity, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, digital twinning and FAIR data to develop the first BioDT prototype. The scientific expertise and existing datasets from four major biodiversity research infrastructures (GBIF, eLTER, DiSSCo, and LifeWatch ERIC) will bring life to BioDT, allowing for coverage of several application domains such as environmental and earth science, climate science, ecology, biology, genomics, natural history, biodiversity informatics, computer sciences, and mathematics / statistics.

Biodiversity Digital Twin and its infrastructure will become an integral component of the Destination Earth initiative and actively participate in its ambition to realise a full Digital Twin of the Earth. The long-term objectives of BioDT are also tightly interconnected with the EC vision for a robust, federated European computing and data infrastructure, and initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and EuroHPC.

Follow BioDT on the project’s website, LinkedIn and Twitter.

CSIC’s Executive Board Members visit LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core

CSIC’s Executive Board Members visit the LifeWatch ERIC ICT Core

On Wednesday 1 June, Dr Jesús Marco de Lucas (Vice-President for Science and Technology of the National Spanish Research Council – CSIC), and Dr Margarita Peneque Sosa (Institutional Coordinator for Andalusia – CSIC) did LifeWatch ERIC the honour of visiting its ICT-Core premises. CSIC is in fact one of the main stakeholders of LifeWatch ERIC in Spain, and the two organisation are tightly working together in the framework of the SUMHAL project.
This project implements a strategy for the conservation of biodiversity in sustainable natural systems of the western Mediterranean area. Its main objective is to combine the results of the work in the field with the opportunities made available through Virtual Research Environments in terms of storage capacity, management and analytical tools, as well as the dissemination of relevant information on the conservation status of Andalusian biodiversity and ecosystems.
The SUMHAL project is contributing not only to the upgrade of the LifeWatch ERIC distributed e-Infrastructure at all levels, from hardware and software, to Human Resources and much more, but also to the enlargement of the infrastructure’s offer of Core and Thematic e-services for emerging communities of practice, focusing on Mediterranean Ecosystems.
At a critical time for its deployment at the European level, the synergies between its ICT-Core and the SUMHAL project will enable LifeWatch ERIC to provide the European scientific community with a large volume of organised systematised information made available through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and at the same time ensure its compliance with LifeWatch ERIC standards.
The SUMHAL project, thanks to the pivotal role played by CISC, the most relevant research institution active in Andalusia, is designing a getaway to attract new users and engage new practitioners in Mediterranean Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research fields. This will have a positive impact on direct and indirect networking, training, communication and dissemination activities, and stimulate knowledge and technology transfer and exchange, enhancing LifeWatch ERIC’s capacity to reach out to stakeholders and international key players (GBIF, GEOSS-GEOBON, CAFF-AMBI, among others) in a transdisciplinary way.
Therefore, the SUMHAL project marks a milestone in the development of LifeWatch ERIC, opening new collaborations for the development of new green and eco-sustainable RD+I activities, and offering the latest advances in biodiversity studies to design Spanish and international, policies to tackle the global changes that are particularly affecting Mediterranean ecosystems.

Towards the ENVRI Community International Summer School: Webinars on Designing and Developing Data Services for End Users

Data Services for End Users Webinars

In the run-up to the ENVRI Community International Summer School in July, LifeWatch ERIC and ENVRI-FAIR will be organising two webinars on “Designing and Developing Data Services for End Users”. Participation in the webinars can be in preparation for the School or as stand-alone sessions, for those who cannot attend the School, or those who are still considering registering. For more information on the ENVRI Community International Summer School “Road to a FAIR ENVRI-Hub: Designing and Developing Data Services for End Users”, please visit the dedicated minisite.

The webinars are particularly aimed at IT architects, Research Infrastructure (RI) service developers and user support staff, and RI staff working on user interaction and community/network building. Links to the sessions will be provided upon registration.

Webinar #1: Service validation & evaluation: making sure your services are up to the task

Date
Friday 17 June, 10:00-11:30 CEST

Where
Zoom (link to be provided upon registration)

Programme

  • Validating services & assessing their TRL – Mark van de Sanden (SURF)
  • Service evaluation: why & how – Yin Chen (EGI)
  • Evaluating ENVRI services: experiences from the ENVRIplus – Maggie Hellström (ICOS)
  • Q&A and general discussion – plenary

Webinar #2: Service documentation & tutorials: rolling out the red carpet for end users

Date
Thursday 23 June, 10:00-11:30 CEST

Where
Zoom (link to be provided upon registration)

Programme

  • Writing effective service documentation for EUDAT services – Rob Carrillo (EUDAT) & Chris Ariyo (EUDAT/CSC)
  • Service tutorial design: experiences from EOSC Synergy – Helen Clare (Jisc)
  • Using Jupyter Notebooks to introduce services to “new” end users – Maggie Hellström (ICOS)
  • Q&A and general discussion – plenary

You can sign up for one or both webinars using the form linked below:

Click here to access the form.

LifeWatch ERIC to Collaborate in New Observatory in the Mar Menor

Observatory in the Mar Menor

Three members of the LifeWatch ERIC Executive Board, alongside collaborator Professor Angel Pérez-Ruzafa, attended the Life Transfer Summit in Murcia today, to mark the opening of an observatory in the Mar Menor, an initiative in which the research infrastructure will actively collaborate. CEO Dr Christos Arvanitidis, CTO Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Service Centre Director Professor Alberto Basset and Professor Ruzafa all made presentations at the meeting, which was attended by Mr Antonio Luengo, Environmental Minister of the Murcia region, to bring his support of the infrastructure on the occasion.

The Life Transfer project, Seagrass Transplantation for Transitional Ecosystem Recovery, aims to trigger the process of recolonisation of aquatic phanerogams –known as “ecosystem engineers”– in selected Mediterranean lagoons. These lagoons are all part of Natura 2000 sites in Spain, Italy and Greece, and the project is funded through the Life programme. You can read more about the project and its initial results here.

CTO Live on ‘Despierta Andalucía’ to Speak on Ecological Crises

Despierta Andalucía

This morning, LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, went live on Andalusian TV to discuss the ecological crises we are facing and to explain the role, the structure, and the ambition of the research infrastructure. He spoke on the programme ‘Despierta Andalucía’ of Canal Sur, noting that the region home to the LifeWatch ERIC Statutory Seat and ICT-Core is known for its excellence in the fields of open software and sustainability research.

During his interview, Dr González-Aranda explained how LifeWatch ERIC makes use of vast amounts of data and cutting-edge technology, such as remote sensing, to monitor and predict changes in the climate and ecosystems, crucial knowledge that can be shared with policymakers and used to develop solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises. He also pointed out the key relationships that the infrastructure holds with various regions all over the world –not just in Europe, but also in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America– which allows for international collaboration in generating and interpreting data, and for the infrastructure to fulfill its ethos of “acting locally, thinking globally”.

LifeWatch ERIC would like to thank Despierta Andalucía, Canal Sur and RTVA for dedicating broadcasting time to shining a light on the current ecological crises, and for raising awareness of European initiatives like LifeWatch ERIC, which offers its free resources and services to researchers and citizen scientists globally.

Click here to watch the full interview, starting at 1:11:07.

BiCIKL Project wraps up the first year of integrating FAIR data on biodiversity

BiCIKL Seville

The fourteen partners of the BiCIKL Project met in Seville (Spain) for their first physical meeting at the beginning of May, one year after the start of the project, whose mission is to catalyse a top-down culture change in the way researchers work with data about the world’s biodiversity at each step of the research process.

“We will cultivate a more transparent, trustworthy and efficient research ecosystem,” were among the words to remember from the meeting’s opening, summarising the rationale behind BiCIKL. 

Hosted by LifeWatch ERIC, the event at La Casa de la Ciencia provided fertile ground for new ideas, as partners spent three days together discussing and analysing how their tools, workflows and platforms have evolved during the past year – and their next steps toward improvements in retrieving, preserving and linking different sources of biodiversity data.

The meeting had a strong technical focus on the transition from one-sided, uni-directional linkages between biodiversity data and infrastructures to more complex bilateral and multi-directional connections across various types of FAIR and open data. 

Dr Joe Miller, Executive Secretary of GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — provided an initial framework for the discussions by placing the work of BiCIKL within the framework of the alliance for biodiversity knowledge. 

So far, such links are mainly possible within the scientific publishing process,  but that’s going to change.

“What researchers and research infrastructures would find particularly useful and enjoyable is that – as a result of our joint efforts at BiCIKL – scientific literature will become an integral part of the biodiversity research lifecycle,”  said Prof Lyubomir Penev, BiCIKL’s Project Coordinator, founder and CEO of Pensoft Publishers. “We are working on several workflows and tools that continue to facilitate the biodiversity publishing of the future even after the project’s end.”

“The most important outcome of this meeting is the return of the BiCIKL community vis-à-vis”, the Partners say, without forgetting what will be next, “Much of the knowledge about biodiversity is largely imprisoned in an ever-growing corpus of 500 million pages of scientific research publications. We are trying to liberate that information as data, make it permanently available from the Biodiversity Literature Repository, and improve international standards and practices more broadly. We include adequate support text, answering questions about biodiversity and data mining applications.

Visit BiCIKL Project’s website at https://bicikl-project.eu/. 

Follow BiCIKL on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation on Twitter at #BiCIKL_H2020.

To learn more about the projects LifeWatch ERIC is involved with, visit our Related Projects page.

LifeWatch ERIC Delegation Visit to Dublin

LifeWatch ERIC Dublin

In early March, LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, and CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, travelled to Ireland to attend several meetings organised in collaboration with University College Dublin (UCD) and Intelligence in Science (ISC).

The goal was to strengthen ties and to collaborate on enhancing the knowledge and conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems in Ireland, which was the topic of several meetings from 2 – 4 March 2022. As well as having the honour of speaking with members of the Irish parliament and ministry, and representatives from the Embassies of Spain and South Africa, the LifeWatch ERIC delegation held bilateral and group meetings with research centres hosted by two of Ireland’s principal universities, as well as other Irish state agencies, universities and private organisations working in this vital research sector.

The delegation was encouraged by the positive experience, and left satisfied that large steps forward had been made to bring these various communities together to fortify collaboration across biodiversity and ecosystem research.

Full itinerary:

Wednesday, 2 March

On their first day, the CEO and CTO had fruitful discussions with Jeremy Gault of MAREI SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine Research and Innovation from University College Cork (UCC), Triona McCormack, Director of Research at UCD; and Michael Ryan, Irish National Delegate to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).

Thursday, 3 March

Thursday was a busy workday. At UCD’s Belfield Campus the LifeWatch ERIC delegation met with the UCD Research Leadership team: Orla Feely, Vice-President for Research Innovation and Impact, Triona McCormack – Director of Research, and Ciara Leonard, Public Affairs Manager.

This was followed by a seminar with UCD researchers, hosted by the SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG), with: Murray Hitzman, iCRAG Director,  Jennifer Craig, iCRAG COO, Aoife Brady, iCRAG’s Industry and Research Programme Manager, Francesca Martini, iCRAG’s Senior Grants Manager, Maeve Boland, iCRAG’sGeoscience Policy, Communications, and Public Affairs Specialist, Dr Aoife Blowick, iCRAG’s Operations Manager, ISC’s Declan Kirrane, and Ciara Leonard.

The delegation then travelled to the Ministry in Dublin, where they were honoured with a meeting with Damien English, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

A seminar followed, held with Daan du Toit from the Department of Science and Innovation of South Africa, joined by Murray Hitzman, Jennifer Craig, Maeve Boland, David Khoza from Integrated Geoscience Development, Declan Kirrane and Ciara Leonard.

To end the day, LifeWatch ERIC hosted a dinner at the Conrad Hotel, attended by many of the day’s meeting participants, such as Ciara Leonard, Maeve Boland, Murray Hitzman, Jennifer Craig and Declan Kirrane, as well as Samuel Browett from the Waterford Institute of Technology, Willem Geerlings from the Embassy of South Africa and Eduardo Sánchez Moreno from the Embassy of Spain.

Friday, 4 March

The last day of meetings were held with Kevin Burke, National Director for Horizon Europe at Enterprise, Ireland, Peter Heffernan from the Marine Institute and Mission Board, and Ian Jones, founder and CEO of Innopharma Group.

Wrapping up the week at the Dail Eireann (Irish parliament), Christos Arvanitidis and Juan Miguel González-Aranda were honoured to meet Jim O’Callaghan, TD (Member of Parliament) for Dublin Bay South.

BiCIKL Project: User Requirements Survey for Biodiversity Scientists

BiCIKL Survey

We invite all biodiversity scientists to fill in this survey, which aims to identify gaps and trends in the ways in which biodiversity scientists access and use data in their research, by asking participants to describe use cases from their previous or projected work experience. The most appealing use cases will be invited to the open call for Trans-national access projects supported by the BiCIKL project.

BiCIKL is an EU project that aims to provide access and tools for seamless linking between the data along the biodiversity research cycle: specimens > sequences > species > analytics > publications > biodiversity knowledge graph > re-use.  BiCIKL will develop and implement new methods and workflows for an integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, accessing and re-using of subarticle-level data (specimens, material citations, samples, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables) extracted from literature. 

Click here to fill in the survey.

Collaborations with the European Topic Centre on Spatial Analysis and Synthesis

ETC-UMA

On 18 February 2022, shortly after attending the Transfiere Forum, LifeWatch ERIC CTO Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda remained in Malaga for a meeting with The European Topic Center on Spatial Analysis and Synthesis (ETC-UMA). The discussion centred around the definition of cooperation areas with LifeWatch ERIC, specifically for the integration of the “Mediterranean Biodiversity Protection Knowledge Platform” (MBPKP) as a LifeWatch ERIC VRE. All of this is based on the EnBIC-Lab2, Indalo, LifeWatch Alboran and other projects, in an area of cooperation within Horizon Europe where biodiversity is a key topic.

Information about ETC-UMA:

The European Topic Centre on Spatial Analysis and Synthesis (ETC-UMA) is an international research centre within the University of Malaga, which since 2011 has supported the development of knowledge to support evidence-based policy. The team has a wide expertise in a range of environmental and socio-economic domains, and its main areas of expertise include land management, ecosystem services, coastal and marine studies, environmental conservation, territorial development, resource efficiency, and soil mapping.

Information about MBPKP:

The MBPKP is an initiative of the Mediterranean Biodiversity Protection Community (MBPC), which brings together researchers, managers, public authorities and environmental institutions in 15 thematic projects under the umbrella of one horizontal initiative for the Mediterranean. Until 2019 this was known as PANACeA until 2019, with renewed support as MBPC until 2022.

The objective of this community is to foster an ecosystem based approach to nature conservation. This overarching coordinating initiative aims to provide: scientific syntheses with clear messages and recommendations for use in management and to inform and influence current policy in the form of factsheets, technical and policy papers, and media materials; spatial tools and databases to generate new knowledge and better integrate past and current datasets from related projects; and enhanced communication and learning through networking and showcasing the outputs of the whole community of projects in key events and fora.

Gender, Equity & Research: In conversation with Africa Zanella on the International Day of Women in Science 2022

Women in Science

On the occasion of the UN International Day of Women and Girls in Science, LifeWatch ERIC Chief Communication Officer, Sara Montinaro, interviewed Africa Zanella, the infrastructure’s International Gender Officer.

When asked to break down what her work entails for those unfamiliar with the position, Zanella explained:

“[My role] means ensuring that there is gender balance in decision-making: in processes, in programmes, in projects, there is always a gender lens […] sometimes when we start looking at research there are already established models which will not yet have been desegregated in terms of gender – so they are repeating the same mistakes over and over again, without giving due consideration to the idea that the role of women has changed over time and that needs have changed […] sustainability depends on women having an equal role.”

On the subject of her own experience working as a woman in scientific fields, she mused that, while “discrimination takes place everywhere”, she has always “broken barriers”, and that these experiences underpin her advocacy work.

“I don’t advocate for equality per se between men and women; I advocate for equal opportunity. If a woman chooses to go into science, there should be no barriers, just as if a man chooses to go into science there should be no barriers, and if different sexual identities go into science, there should be no barriers.”

She went on to identify the reasons why women and girls are often overlooked in research as stereotypes, unconscious bias and cultural issues, explaining: “The established pattern has been there for such a long time that people assume that that’s the way it is, […] but the stereotype is not right across the board; there are a lot more women doctors than there were in the past, even over my own lifetime – but for researchers, it’s a different story.” Continuing, she proposed that the answer is to keep advocating for equality, and not to accept unfair treatment, advising “if your organisation does not appreciate your contribution and your relevance to the topic that is at hand, then you have to change,” emphasising that recognition should be defined by how we reward people financially.

Zanella concluded with the following message for young women in science:

“I hope that I encourage young girls to look at themselves as the carriers of this innovative practice which says ‘I am not a victim, and I am not a hero. But I am a human being and I want to live my full potential, therefore; don’t put any barriers in front of me. Let me see what the law says, let me see how my company is supporting me, let me see how I can make my contribution to the world.’ And that is the message that I would like to convey on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science: Make a contribution.”

You can listen to the full podcast below, or find it on all major podcast platorms.