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.