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 a major 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.

MARBEFES Autumn School 2025: Save the date

MARBEFES Autumn School

The MARBEFES project (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services) 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 of these evaluations feed into easy-to-use tools to help practitioners and policy maximise the ecological value and optimise a sustainable socio-economic use of the marine system for current and future generations.
The project members will present and discuss these tools, for biodiversity and ecosystem assessment and measurement, and ecological, social and economic evaluation, during the Autumn School 2025 “Protecting marine biodiversity for nature and humans”.

Organised by the MARBEFES project, and aimed at students, early career scientists, young researchers, early career practitioners (in statutory agencies, consultancies, etc), this 3-day Autumn School will take place from 8-10 October 2025, in Seville (Spain).

The Autumn School will welcome 20 participants, offering accommodation, travel (up to a predetermined amount, if exceeded participants will have to cover the difference) and lunch for the duration of the programme.
The Call for Applications will open in mid July on the project’s official website: https://marbefes.eu.
Stay tuned for updates!

Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience and the Triple Planetary Crisis: the LifeWatch ERIC Community meets in Heraklion at BEeS 2025!

The BEeS Conference 2025 is approaching! From 30 June to 3 July, Heraklion, Crete, will host the 2025 edition of the Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference (BEeS), LifeWatch ERIC’s flagship event, hosted this year by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) and the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture (IMBBC). The event will gather researchers, policy-makers and ecosystem experts to discuss some of today’s most urgent global challenges.

Under the overarching theme of the Triple Planetary Crisis (climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution), BEeS 2025 will explore how eScience and European Research Infrastructures (RIs) can contribute to understanding and addressing its complex impacts.

This year, contributions have been structured around six thematic areas, reflecting the priorities identified by LifeWatch ERIC in collaboration with its National Distributed Centres, and coordinated by the corresponding Thematic Services Working Groups:

  • Biodiversity & Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change
  • Mapping Life on Planet Earth: Biogeography in a Changing World
  • Taxonomy: Identifying the Units of Diversity in Life
  • Exploring Boundaries of Life Hosting Spaces: Habitat Mapping
  • Biodiversity Observatory: Smart Systems for a Living Planet
  • Tracking the Wild: Animal Movement, Behaviour, and Biologging

The Call for Abstracts closed in May, and the submissions are currently under evaluation by the Working Group coordinators. These abstracts will shape the content of the oral and poster presentations distributed across the four-day programme.

The event will begin with a closed round table for representatives of European Research Infrastructures, aimed at identifying complementarities and synergies between their activities. The session brings together infrastructures working on biodiversity, ecosystems and the social components of the biosphere, under the lens of the One Health approach.

The first day will be fully dedicated to Research Infrastructures and presentations from the plenary speakers:

  • Prof. Anastasios Eleftheriou (HCMR), “Man and the Sea”
  • Prof. Carole Goble (University of Manchester), “Sharing and Re-using Computational Workflows – WorkflowHub and FAIR Workflows in Biodiversity”
  • Dr. Nikos Kyrpides (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), “The Dark Matter in Biology”.

The thematic sessions in the following days of the conference, will see the participation of Dr. Richard Field, (University of Nottingham), and Dr. Tammy Horton, (National Oceanography Centre).
In addition to scientific sessions and poster presentations, the conference will offer hands-on workshops focused on key LifeWatch ERIC services, including its Virtual Laboratories (vLabs) and Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The final day will be dedicated entirely to training activities.

Participation in BEeS 2025 is free of charge but subject to registration via the online form. The conference also offers special networking opportunities, including joint lunches and a social dinner with wine tasting and a vineyard tour at the stunning Scalarea Estate.

BEeS 2025 is supported by sponsors including Pensoft and Cretan Rhizotomists, and will see the participation of several related projects and initiatives.

Stay updated via the conference page, and keep an eye out for the upcoming publication of the Book of Abstracts through our website and newsletter.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change Workshop

biodiversity ecosystem responses workshop (2)

Lecce, Italy

The LifeWatch ERIC Working Group on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change and the National Biodiversity Future Center organise the workshop on “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change“, to be held in Lecce, Italy, on 12 and 13 June 2025.

Climate change is profoundly affecting biodiversity and ecosystem processes, with implications at the global scale for primary productivity, standing biomass as well as potential impacts on human well-being and the achievement of SDGs. Biodiversity and ecosystem responses span ecological scales, encompassing structural and functional components, from individual life cycles and energetics to inter-individual interactions, population and species densities and distributions, to ecological networks and ecosystem services.

A proposal for a Special Issue including a selection of the workshop contributions has been presented to Ecological Indicators. Contributions will be presented as short talks of 10 minutes.

To find out more about our speakers, register and submit your abstract, please visit the following page:

https://www.lifewatch.eu/thematic-services-working-groups/wg-climate-change/meetings/workshop-biodiversity-and-ecosystem-responses-to-climate-change

Project RESTORE4Cs launches a School Competition about Coastal Wetlands

RESTORE4Cs School Competition

Coastal Wetlands are broadly defined as “areas of saltwater and freshwater located within coastal zones”1. These areas are among the most crucial ecosystems, playing a key role for climate neutrality, biodiversity protection, zero-pollution, and circular economy.

The project RESTORE4Cs recently launched a Serious Game School Competition: a fun and easy way to make school students learn about this fascinating world.

Acting as natural sponges, coastal wetlands are able to regulate the water cycle and mitigate both floods and droughts. Some particular types can actively sequester and accumulate organic carbon, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, they host a range of plant and animal species uniquely adapted to their specific characteristics and soil conditions.

To give you an idea of just how vital they are, here’s an example we recently came across from the US: an initiative called “Wild Mile” (https://wildmile.org/), by the nonprofit organisation Urban Rivers. Volunteers at Urban Rivers are building a floating eco-park on the Chicago River, made up of artificial habitats that actually mimic wetlands, with the objective of restoring the river’s waters to their pre-industrial state. The rapid development of the city and the use of the river’s waters as a channel for industrial shipping in the 18th Century, in fact, had left the river floor in conditions of extreme pollution.

In Europe, coastal wetlands are disappearing at a fast rate (here’s some data collected by RESTORE4Cs in occasion of the World Wetlands Day: https://www.restore4cs.eu/world-wetlands-day-2024/). But let’s focus on the positives! Some of our original wetlands are still holding on and fighting to survive: it is vital that we do everything in our power to protect them.

A lot of effort is already being dedicated to research and policy investments: a good indicator that the scientific and policy communities are becoming increasingly aware of the issue. Another crucial front in the fight to protect these ecosystems is education.

That’s where the Serious Game School Competition comes in. Taking place in mid-April 2025, this engaging initiative invites students aged 12 and older from across Europe to explore the essential ecological functions of wetlands, their role in biodiversity and how they contribute to climate resilience, all through a fun, interactive gaming experience.

Schools and teachers interested in participating can find all details and registration information on the RESTORE4Cs website: https://www.restore4cs.eu/restore4cs-school-competition/.

If you’re a teacher, or know one who might be interested, don’t miss this opportunity to introduce future researchers to these vital concepts!

  1. Source: RESTORE4Cs 1st Policy Brief: https://www.restore4cs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy-Brief_web.pdf ↩︎