The psychological impact of marine sounds: meet Waves of Resonance

Waves of Resonance

In June 2025, the European Marine Board launched the sound project “Waves of Resonance”, with the artist Elise Guillaume and her scientific collaborators: Clea Parcerisas (LifeWatch Belgium) and Marine Severin (VLIZ). The Belgian artist works on the interactions between psychology, ecology and notions of care. With Waves of Resonance she explores the psychological impact of climate change and the therapeutic potential of ocean sounds.

The project started during the EMBracing the Ocean artist-in-residence programme under the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development: a unique idea combining a wide range of different sounds, such as singing whales and cracking sea ice, fish and crustaceans, human activities like ship engines and pile-driving, dolphins, seabirds and many others. It also includes sounds normally inaudible to the human ear, with the results of having multi-layered sound installations that aim to strengthen emotional connection to the ocean.

LifeWatch Belgium has played a key role in the project, providing the underwater sound data from its observatory in the Belgian part of the North Sea.

Waves of Resonance also addresses the critical issue of sound pollution and aims to inspire pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Throughout the project, Elise also documented the coastal landscape and the scientific recording processes, developing her photographs with seaweed as a low-toxicity alternative.

Find out more on this project: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/waves-resonance-artistic-journey-lifewatch-belgiums-ocean-data

Picture: Acoustic equipment being retrieved with VLIZ acoustic team, North Sea, 2024 © John Janssens & Elise Guillaume

LifeWatch ERIC presents preliminary results of ENERGYTRAN at high-level meeting in Costa Rica

ENERGYTRAN Preliminary Results

San José, Costa Rica, 18 September 2025. LifeWatch ERIC participated in the High-Level Meeting on Energy Transition and Climate Sustainability, organised by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) at the Consejo Nacional de Rectores (CONARE). The event brought together regional and international leaders, as well as representatives from international organisations, embassies, universities, research centres, and civil society, to forge strategic alliances for accelerating the energy transition across Ibero-America and Europe.

Representing LifeWatch ERIC, Maite Irazabal delivered a presentation on the preliminary results of the EULAC ENERGYTRAN project, highlighting its contributions to strengthening collaboration between Europe and Latin America. Among the results presented were advances in open science practices, the use of digital research infrastructures, and the development of analytical tools that support evidence-based decision-making in climate and energy policies. These outcomes illustrate how European Research Infrastructures are fostering interoperability, data access, and collaborative workflows to address global sustainability challenges.

The project is currently piloting innovative approaches, including analytical workflows for the energy transition, e-learning courses, and virtual collaboration platforms, all designed to improve the accessibility, quality, and usability of large-scale environmental and energy data.

“By fostering collaboration across regions, we are building a more sustainable and resilient knowledge ecosystem,” said Maite Irazabal during her presentation. “The ENERGYTRAN project is not only advancing science and innovation but also creating the conditions for more inclusive and impactful solutions to today’s environmental challenges.”

The participation of LifeWatch ERIC in this meeting marked another step towards reinforcing its long-term engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean, positioning open science and research infrastructures at the core of international cooperation for sustainability.

European network releases White Paper on Science, Technology, and Innovation collaboration to advance the UN SDGs

White Paper

A network of legal entities based in Europe, coordinated by LifeWatch ERIC, has released a white paper that presents a collaborative commitment to leveraging scientific knowledge and digital innovation, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Emerging from discussions at the 79th United Nations General Assembly and the Science Summit (SSUNGA79), the white paper is the result of joint work by a network of partners with global interests in biodiversity, ecology, engineering and beyond. These organisations have decided to combine their expertise through European initiatives such as Research Infrastructures, e-Infrastructures, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Digital Twin projects and academic publishers. Their aim is to provide a strong base for collaboration and to contribute strategically to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (K-M GBF) targets. Moreover, they also seek to forge an international alliance to further integrate biodiversity conservation into the UN Summit of the Future priorities and the post-SDG agenda.

The starting point is clear: biodiversity can no longer be treated as a siloed issue. It is foundational to climate resilience, public health, food security, and economic stability. The three interconnected planetary crises facing humanity (biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution) represent the most urgent challenges of our time. Addressing them requires collective efforts from scientific communities, as well as the public and private sectors and policymakers.

In this context, Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) are crucial, because the complex transformations we need demand data-driven decision-making, cross-sectoral collaboration, and multidisciplinary and cross-domain research frameworks.

The network had already demonstrated this holistic approach during a workshop held in New York, in September 2024, as part of the SSUNGA79. Building on that foundation, the organisations now focus on their shared impact, rather than individual achievements. They have identified the K-M GBF as a testbed for contributing to the SDGs, based on long-track experience in European initiatives.

The K-M GBF itself focuses on seven strategic considerations, and twenty-three specific targets for its implementation. In the white paper, the network has been working collectively on the seven strategic considerations, outlining practical ways to contributing to each of them.

Moreover, the paper expands to other UN STI priorities and sets the basis for a global alliance: a convergence point for diverse knowledge systems, from cutting-edge digital tools and genomic research to traditional ecological practices, and as a mechanism for aligning efforts across thematic domains, such as climate, health, food, and equity. 

Full announcement: https://blog.pensoft.net/2025/09/16/scientists-call-for-a-global-alliance-to-place-biodiversity-at-the-heart-of-the-un-pact-for-the-future

NELOS divers will now access WoRMS from their digital dive log

NELOS divers

NELOS, the Flemish diving federation, has recently integrated WoRMS (the World Register of Marine Species, supported by LifeWatch Belgium), into its internal platform DIVES: a Digital Verification System used to log tens of thousands of dives each year.

This integration marks a very important achievement, because divers will now be able to record the marine species that they come across during their observations, in direct connection with the WoRMS database!

The WoRMS database provides an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, controlled by taxonomic and thematic experts and continuously updated. Its editorial management system, in fact, includes one expert for each taxonomic group, who controls the quality of each entry. The editors can also invite specialists of smaller groups to revise specific species.

An interesting characteristic of the new integration with DIVES, is that the platform adapts to common marine species names used in Dutch, and through a built-in search function, it automatically provides the scientifically correct version of the name.

This integration has a great potential to support future research by becoming a valuable data source, supporting citizen science and marine biodiversity through simple digital tools.

Read more about this on LifeWatch Belgium:

https://www.lifewatch.be/news/nelos-divers-use-worms-digital-dive-log-step-toward-citizen-science

LifeWatch ERIC and CSIC working together towards a unified platform for biodiversity modelling

LifeWatch ERIC plus MNCN-CSIC

As part of its ongoing mission to provide state-of-the-art tools for biodiversity and ecosystem research, LifeWatch ERIC is collaborating with CSIC on an initiative to build a unified, open platform for biodiversity modelling. Below is the full announcement from MaraujoLab:

LifeWatch ERIC and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC), through the Biogeography and Global Change Group led by Research Professor Miguel Bastos Araújo, have signed a four-year Memorandum of Understanding to develop a cutting-edge platform for biodiversity model outputs. The collaboration seeks to address one of the most pressing scientific and societal challenges of our time: understanding and forecasting biodiversity responses to global environmental change.

This strategic partnership capitalises on LifeWatch ERIC’s mission to mobilise and integrate biodiversity data and computational tools across Europe and beyond, and on the MNCN-CSIC team’s internationally recognised leadership in biogeography, macroecology and climate change biology.

At the core of the agreement lies the co-development of a public database platform for sharing, comparing and validating outputs of biodiversity models —especially species distribution models under climate change scenarios. The platform will support explanatory, predictive and forecasting applications, and will be openly accessible to scientists, conservation practitioners and decision-makers worldwide.

“Making biodiversity model outputs findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) is essential to unlock their full potential for science and policy” says Miguel Araújo. “This platform will facilitate cumulative science while supporting evidence-based decision-making in conservation and environmental management”.

Dr Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of LifeWatch ERIC, emphasises the importance of federated infrastructures and domain expertise: “This collaboration illustrates how distributed research infrastructures like LifeWatch can synergise with world-leading scientific teams to deliver services of high societal relevance. We are proud to support this joint venture”.

The platform will be co-branded by both institutions and will evolve in phases —from conceptual design, pilot studies and expert networking to community testing and global deployment. It aims to serve as a benchmark repository for biodiversity modelling outputs and to promote transparency, reproducibility and comparability in ecological forecasting.

By aligning LifeWatch ERIC’s infrastructure development capacity with the scientific excellence of researchers at MNCN-CSIC, this partnership sets the stage for a new era of collaborative biodiversity research and innovation.

MARBEFES Autumn School 2025: Call for Applications now open!

Great news! The MARBEFES Autumn School 2025 has now opened its Call for Applications, giving 20 participants the possibility to book one of the limited places by 31 August.

MARBEFES (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services) is a EU-funded project aiming to evaluate and characterise the links between marine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services and the resulting societal goods and benefits in coastal communities.

The Autumn School “Protecting marine biodiversity for nature and humans” will take place in Seville (Spain) from 8 to 10 October 2025. It will offer participants travel, accommodation and lunch (see terms and conditions), for the duration of the programme, and has the objective of presenting one of the main project’s results: a set of easy-to-use-tools to help practitioners and policy makers maximise the ecological value and optimise a sustainable socio-economic use of the marine system for current and future generations.

The school programme will consist of four training modules:

  1. Assessing biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services
    1. Assessing ecological structure and functioning
    2. Biodiversity and climate change
    3. ARIES tool (assessment component)
  2. Risks and impacts
    1. Assessing risks and hazards to marine biodiversity
    2. Broad-scale measures of biodiversity and habitat quality 
  3. Valuing nature
    1. Ecologically valuing biodiversity – system levels
    2. Socio-cultural valuation and biodiversity 
    3. Socio-economic valuation of biodiversity
    4. ARIES tool (valuation component)
  4. Decision-making for management
    1. Social-ecological systems analysis in marine management
    2. Biodiversity management and the role of decisions support systems DSS

If you are a student, early career scientist, young researcher or early career practitioner interested in biodiversity and ecosystem assessment and measurement, and ecological, social and economic evaluation, apply from this page: https://www.lifewatch.eu/marbefes-autumn-school-2025!

RESTORE4Cs Autumn Series: training for scientists and policy makers

RESTORE4Cs Autumn Series

Join the RESTORE4Cs Autumn Series of trainings for scientists and policy makers in November 2025!

RESTORE4Cs assesses the role of restoration action on wetlands capacity in terms of climate change mitigation and a wide range of ecosystem services using an integrative socio-ecological systems approach.

The trainings will take place in Malaga (Spain), from 3 to 6 November, and they will focus on the main project output: a digital Decision Support System (DSS) that will provide stakeholders and wetland practitioners at all levels with more reliable estimation of cost and benefits in order to drive and prioritise wetlands restoration actions.

The two programmes are tailored respectively for researchers and wetlands and restoration managers (as early users of the toolbox), and for experts involved in decision-making processes concerning coastal wetlands and protected areas:

  • RESTORE4Cs Autumn School 2025 for the Scientific Community: November 3-6, 20 participants
  • RESTORE4Cs Training for Policy Makers: November 5-6, 10-15 participants

The Call for Applications will open in August. For more and upcoming details on the detailed programme, travel conditions and applications, follow up on the RESTORE4Cs website: https://www.restore4cs.eu/restore4cs-autumn-series-2025-save-the-date

Weever fish sevenfold increase reported by SeaWatch-B might be linked to warmer waters

weever fish

SeaWatch-B (https://www.vliz.be/projects/seawatch-b), the VLIZ citizen science project supported by LifeWatch Belgium, has observed that the weever fish counts were seven times higher this year, compared to the same period of time (April to June) of 2024. This venomous species buries itself in the sand and stings through its dorsal or gill-cover spines, and its surge along the Belgian North Sea coast seems linked to warmer waters.

The aim of the SeaWatch-B beach observation network is to address the lack of reliable long-term data that allow to identify trends in the ever changing landscape of the North Sea. In fact, during the last 50 years, the North Sea has noticeably changed, warming twice as fast as the global average for ocean and seas.

This fast change has affected especially cold-water species, causing an increase in animals and plants originating from the Atlantic Ocean or further south. Through the description and evaluation of the long-term evolution of this shifts, SeaWatch-B can provide science with the necessary data to inform and advise policy.

Trained volunteers have been conducting standardised surveys along various costal transects, four times a year since 2024, to provide data on beach usage, marine life, sea temperatures, pollution and early dune formation, and they will issue a report in 2026.

Read more about the weever fish increase on the LifeWatch Belgium website: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/sevenfold-increase-stinging-weever-fish-observed-seawatch-b

Uniting Science for One Health: European RIs sign Declaration of Intent at BEeS 2025

Declaration of Intent

The BEeS 2025 Conference began on Monday, 30 June 2025, with a discussion about adopting a Declaration of Intent during the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) “Working Table on Life component of the Biosphere: Complementarities and Synergies”, which was chaired by Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC’s CEO, Peter van Tienderen, LifeWatch ERIC’s VLIZ Director and Alberto Basset, LifeWatch ERIC’s Service Center Director.

The Declaration of Intent, the Crete Declaration, follows the event’s objective of defining a collaborative roadmap and formalises the intent of the parties involved to collaborate.

The closed-door Working Table involved RIs, e-Infrastructures, EU-relevant projects and scientific publishers, all united by the common cause of advancing the One Health approach, a strategy that optimises the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, through collaboration, research product integration, and open science.

This is of vital importance since the challenges of our time (climate change, biodiversity degradation, and emerging diseases) are complex and deeply intertwined, and they demand a joint effort of complementary strengths.

The Declaration focused the signatories’ commitment around four key strategic points:

  1. Strengthening the strategic collaboration
  2. Advancing data integration and FAIR principles
  3. Supporting Open Science Ecosystems
  4. Informing Policy and Practice

The parties welcome all European stakeholders committed to One Health to endorse this Declaration and contribute to its implementation.

New release of Metadata Catalogue!

Metadata Catalogue

We are thrilled to announce the new release of the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue (https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu), a standard-based information management system based on GeoNetwork 4.2.11.

The system is designed and implemented to enable access to several resources from a variety of external providers, represented in the Catalogue as “groups”, through descriptive metadata, enhancing and promoting the information exchange and sharing among organisations and research infrastructures.

The Catalogue is operational since 2020: its main goal is to increase collaboration within and among organisations, in order to reduce duplication and enhance information consistency and quality. It also aims to improve the accessibility of a wide variety of resources along with the associated information, organised and documented in a standard and consistent way.
Moreover, the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue allows (upon validation and verification) the creation of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for resources that do not have it, by exploiting the GeoNetwork – DataCite connection.

The system allows to manage metadata related to five kinds of resources: Datasets, Research Site, Services, Virtual Research Environments (VREs), and Workflows by using the EML 2.2.0 and a customised ISO 19139 standards respectively. The new release adds a sixth one to the list, that is the “Training resource”, whose metadata schema is based on the EOSC training profile to ensure and improve the resource discoverability.
This version also includes significant performance improvements, bug fixes, and user interface upgrades to make your experience smoother and more intuitive.

Moreover, with this release, you can now explore several new functionalities:

  • a more user-friendly editor with new functions to easily create metadata records (copy to function, prefill utility, validators, etc.);
  • a direct connection with EcoPortal Thesauri and Controlled Vocabularies to address the metadata inconsistency or incompleteness challenge;
  • a full redactional workflow to support and validate the entire publication process with appropriate roles and email notifications;
  • an easy and improved approach to require the DOI;
  • the FAIRness assessment tool, that allows to assess the FAIRness of the entire catalogue, by resource type and on specific metadata record;
  • the continuous monitoring on reachability of URLs;
  • the possibility to create new metadata profiles via user interface;
  • more info for the users in terms of metrics and KPIs;
  • direct connection with the LifeWatch ERIC Help Desk knowledge base to show the relevant FAQs.

The APIs are available here (https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu/doc/api/index.html). The new version of the documentation is under development and will be published soon. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact us at service.centre[at]lifewatch.eu.