Seville City Council supports LifeWatch ERIC expansion and 2023 events on the theme of biodiversity

Biodiversity event Seville 2023

On 14 February, the mayor of Seville, Antonio Muñoz, visited the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core offices in the Cartuja Science and Technological Park, showing the City Council’s support for the consortium, which he describes as a “powerful ecosystem of innovation, science and research in Seville” and whose activity contributes to placing it on the map in terms of the two great challenges facing cities: the fight against climate change and digital transformation.

During the visit hosted by Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO, the mayor promised that Seville City Council will back the infrastructure in its organisation of two major international events on biodiversity in 2023. The first will be The LifeWatch ERIC BEeS Biodiversity & Ecosystem eScience Conference “Threats and challenges to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation from an eScience perspective” from 22–24 May, coinciding with the celebration of World Biodiversity Day on May 22, and will include the participation of representatives and experts from numerous countries. More information soon to come! The second will be on 5–6 July, with great European, Spanish and Latin American institutional relevance, and will be included in the programme of activities of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union during the second semester of 2023. LifeWatch ERIC last welcomed biodiversity information facilitity representatives from Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean to its Seville seat in November 2022 – click here to watch the highlights video.

Furthermore, the City Council is going to support LifeWatch ERIC in its expansion of spaces, activity and personnel, as the infrastructure is pinned as one of the organisations to participate in the new innovation and research ecosystem that the Seville City Council wants to deploy, taking advantage of the potential of the Spanish Space Agency with the configuration of the new hub and the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

LifeWatch ERIC leads numerous European programmes from its Seville seat. A notable example, by election of the European Commission, is the scientific data information technology work package for the European global programme on agroecology and agrobiodiversity, to help contribute to a green and digital revolution throughout Europe. For this initiative, LifeWatch ERIC is developing an innovative virtual research environment based on its Tesseract and LifeBlock platforms, which will support the tokenisation of ecosystem services, contributing to monitoring for Common Agricultural Policy schemes based on agroecological practices and low-carbon agriculture.

LifeWatch ERIC presents its endeavours in remote sensing and support for indigenous knowledge at UNOOSA meeting

UNOOSA

This week has seen the participation of LifeWatch ERIC in the UNOOSA COPUOS STSC 60th Session 2023, which is taking place at the Vienna International Centre in Austria from 6–17 February 2023.

COPUOS is the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, set up by UNOOSA, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, to govern the exploration and use of space for the benefit of all humanity. It reviews international cooperation in peaceful uses of outer space, studying space-related activities that could be undertaken by the United Nations, encouraging space research programmes, and studying legal problems arising from the exploration of outer space. STSC stands for the Scientific and Technical Subcomittees, which are holding plenary and technical sessions, in which LifeWatch ERIC is taking part:

On Wednesday 8 February, Jaime Lobo Domínguez-Roqueta, LifeWatch ERIC Satellite & HAPS Operations Manager, participated in the SCTC Plenary Session, presenting LifeWatch ERIC’s close collaboration with CANEUS International as well as the infrastructure’s efforts in the Remote Sensing field, using the example of the launch of AGAPA-1 nanosatellite for the SmartFood project in October 2023 and related mission operations.

In the STSC Technical Session the following day, Milind Pimprikar, Chairman of CANEUS, and Jaime Lobo Domínguez-Roqueta held a presentation entitled “Indigenous Knowledge Research Infrastructure (IKRI) and Remote Sensing for Sustainability Applications”, co-prepared with LifeWatch ERIC CTO and Director of the ICT-Core Common Facility, Dr. Juan Miguel González-Aranda. IKRI is a Global Research and Knowledge Repository initiativerun with the participation of LifeWatch ERIC, CANUS, FILAC, UNOOSA and AERAP Science, which aims to develop a global collaborative infrastructure using Public-Private-Partnership. It does this by seeking to leverage the power of Earth observation and AI to capture, process, analyse, and present indigenous knowledge from multiple sources, to achieve implementation of UN SDGs and 2030 Agenda targets and action items. Watch here from 1:22:00.

Andalusian Government Commends LifeWatch ERIC as an Invaluable Ally in the Green Revolution

Green Revolution

On Thursday 2 February, directors and representatives of the LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities in Seville were welcomed to the government office of the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla. LifeWatch ERIC members were invited for an afternoon at the beautiful Palacio de San Telmo in Seville with the President, who described the infrastructure as an “invaluable ally” in the Green Revolution, which is being widely promoted in the region.

The President praised the infrastructure for its open science model, through which it can provide advanced digital analysis tools to stakeholders for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services, highlighting the synergies between the infrastructure and the regional Ministries of Sustainability, Environment and Blue Economy and that of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development, whose respective ministers, Carmen Crespo, and Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, were both present for the occasion. He underlined how the government can make use of LifeWatch ERIC’s expertise in cutting-edge technologies such as AI in a number of ERDF projects, which rely on digitisation and innovation processes to generate environmental knowledge, in order to foster a culture of sustainability.

Good examples include the SmartFood project, in which LifeWatch ERIC is collaborating with Ministry of Agriculture and a number of partners to launch its first nanosatellite this year, which will offer useful information to helpadvance the sustainability of agriculture and fisheries, contributing to the digitisation of the primary sector. Another fine example is the Índalo project, which proposes building a technological infrastructure from which to monitor environmental changes in Andalusia in order to define the most suitable measures for resource management.

LifeWatch ERIC is grateful to the president and the Andalusian government for the gesture of recognition, and is honoured to provide tools and services which can contribute to the betterment of the environment in the region.

You can watch the President’s speech here (in Spanish).


LifeWatch ERIC and Andalusian Government Announce Details on SmartFood Nanosatellite Launch

SmartFood nanosatellite launch

The Councillor for Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development of the Junta de Andalucía, Carmen Crespo, was welcomed to LifeWatch ERIC’s ICT-Core office in Seville yesterday, accompanied by the director of the Andalusian Agricultural and Fisheries Management Agency (AGAPA), José Carlos Álvarez, to discuss trailblazing agroecology initiatives which will have wide-ranging impacts. 2023 is an exciting year for LifeWatch ERIC, as it gains traction in the EU research and innovation sector.

LifeWatch ERIC has a strong historic collaboration with the Junta de Andalucía, one such synergy being with the AGAPA on the ERDF SmartFood project, for which a nanosatellite equipped with a very high resolution multispectral camera will be launched in October this year from a Space X base in the United States. The aim of the SmartFood project is to monitor the impact of agriculture, livestock and fishing on the sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystems ­– LifeWatch ERIC has the technological lead here, and is creating the nanosatellite mission control centre “eBRIC” (eBiodiversity Research & Innovation International Centre) in the Doñana National Park, in partnership with the University of Huelva. Among other things, the centre will focus on interconnected sensorisation at the terrestrial, atmospheric (observation stations, drones) and spatial level (satellites); the study of invasive species; aquifer conservation; native flora and fauna protection; and virtual laboratories for scientific research in the Cloud, using ICT such as Big Data, Artificial-Deep Intelligence “Deep Learning”, and especially Blockchain, through the LifeWatch ERIC LifeBlock tool. The infrastructure conceives the e-BRIC as an international reference centre for Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, aligned with the United Nations through the UNOOSA Office for Biodiversity and Climate Change.

Crespo also congratulated the infrastructure on being chosen to play a key technological role in the AELLRI EU Partnership initiative proposed by the European Commission, as part of the Horizon Europe topic provisionally entitled “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures”, to pioneer the EU’s agricultural transition towards sustainable agroecological models. She highlighted “the importance of the research work carried out by Lifewatch ERIC, offering important data that allows better decisions to be made in the pursuit of sustainable agriculture and preserving biodiversity”, citing how these technological innovations will support Andalusia in reaching and maintaining EU ecological agricultural objectives, both on land and at sea.

CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda underlined the importance of the agricultural, fishing and livestock sector within the green and blue development paradigms, in coordination with the Green Deal and Blue Growth policies of the EU, and expressed his gratitude for the institutional support, especially from the Ministry of Agriculture, pointing out that “biodiversity cannot turn its back on the primary sector, which is so important for the Autonomous Community of Andalusia”.

LifeWatch ERIC Wins Prize at AI for Science Workshop

AI for Science

The AI for Science Workshop was held from 12–16 December in Rabat, Morocco, organised by NASSMA, MASCIR, and the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Artificial Intelligence offers the promise of revolutionising the way scientific discoveries are done, and tremendously accelerate their pace. However, major challenges still remain in this nascent field of AI for Science, and the goal of this workshop was to address and discuss challenges such as novel methods for AI for Science, tackling the right set of scientific problems, enabling scientific discoveries with AI, and the journey from scientific discovery to a practical application. 

LifeWatch ERIC was represented at the event by its Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Assistant, Yassir Benhammou, who exhibited the ERDF-funded SmartEcoMountains project, which combines interdisciplinary perspectives to obtain and integrate data on how global change affects mountain ecosystems. He displayed a poster on the project “Satellite RGB images and Time Series datasets for automatic Global Land Use/Cover mapping using Deep Learning”, presenting two Smart Global datasets, TimeSpec4LULC* and Sentinel2GlobalLULC**, to train Machine Learning models to perform land use/cover mapping. These two datasets are published in two renowned journals: Earth System Science Data (IF-2021=11,81) and Scientific Data (IF-2021=8,5). On the final day of the event, it won the “best poster prize”. LifeWatch ERIC is delighted and honoured by the recognition afforded by the panel, which featured representatives of pioneers in AI such as UM6P, DeepMind, University of Cambridge, the Morrocan Foundation for Advanced Science, Innovation and Research and Google.

For more information on projects in which the infrastructure is involved, please see our related projects page.

*Authors of TimeSpec4LULC: Rohaifa Khaldi, Domingo Alcaraz-Segura, Emilio Guirado, Yassir Benhammou, Abdellatif El Afia, Francisco Herrera, Siham Tabik. Article link: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/1377/2022/

**Authors of Sentinel2GlobalLULC: Yassir Benhammou, Domingo Alcaraz-Segura, Emilio Guirado, Rohaifa Khaldi, Boujemâa Achchab, Francisco Herrera, Siham Tabik. Article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01775-8

LifeWatch ERIC at COP15 US-Africa Summit in Washington

COP15 US Africa Summit

LifeWatch ERIC continued its contribution to COP15 on 12 December, when Chief Technology Officer Juan Miguel González-Aranda gave a presentation to the US-Africa Summit in Washington D.C. entitled “United in BIOdiversity: e-Research Collaboration on (e-)Biodiversity & Ecosystem Sustainable Management in support of the accomplishment of SDG 2030. A Global Challenge”.

Dr González-Aranda’s thesis is that we are moving towards the Sixth Great Extinction, and that it is of essential importance that we address our current environmental challenges and provide knowledge-based strategic solutions to biodiversity loss. LifeWatch ERIC’s Big Data tools allow researchers to assess and monitor ecosystem functions and then provide science-based knowledge so decision-makers can intervene to restore the biodiversity on which human wellbeing depends.  

The US-Africa Summit, 12–16 December, is a side event to the 15th Conference of the parties in Montreal, Canada, the main objective of which is to adopt the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, released in July 2021, and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. COP15 recognises that urgent policy action globally, regionally and nationally is required to transform economic, social and financial models to reverse the trends that have exacerbated biodiversity loss.

LifeWatch ERIC Contributes to United Nations COP15 Biodiversity Conference in Montreal

COP15

COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, is not as well-known as the COP27, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention and Climate Change, held last month in Egypt. However, the Biodiversity Conference, 7-19 December in Montreal, Canada, is the most significant conference on biodiversity in a decade because it will see the adoption of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, which provides a strategic vision and a global roadmap for the conservation, protection, restoration and sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystems for the next 10 years.

LifeWatch ERIC, the European Infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, was represented, virtually, by Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board member Juan Miguel González-Aranda, in an ancillary event on 8 December 2022, organised by the Indigenous Knowledge Research Infrastructure (IKRI), dedicated to addressing the challenges for biodiversity and resiliency of ecosystems. Dr Milind Pimprikar, Chairman of CANEUS, moderated the session, emphasising that indigenous knowledge and practices need to recognised and documented to leverage, integrate and address the urgent challenges the world is facing.

Dr González-Aranda’s contribution described LifeWatch ERIC’s provision of data services as structuring tools in the federation of indigenous knowledge to assist sustainable environmental management, and cited case studies in food, agroecology and green medicine systems. Indigenous knowledge is key to collaborating in a global climate change scenario, he argued, adding that LifeWatch ERIC’s e-Science tools a “Tactical Perspective Action” of not reinventing the wheel, but bringing together sustainable management communities of practice. The infrastructure already works with many countries in guaranteeing the FAIR-ness of data, their interoperability, providing science-based examples of best practice.

The IKRI session at COP15 featured nine other speakers from around the globe and the panel consisted of: Ms. Joan Carling, Executive Director, Indigenous Peoples Rights International, Philippines; Ms. Nāmaka Rawlins, Director of Neʻepapa, Aha Pūnana Leo, Hawaii; Dr. Hussein Isack, Kivulini Trust, Kenya; and Dr. Terence Hay-Edie, GEF Small Grants Programme Advisor, United Nations Development Programme. 

LifeWatch ERIC CTO COP15

The ALL-Ready Project 3rd Pilot Network Meeting

ALL-Ready Pilot Network Meeting

Following the successful ALL-Ready regional workshop held in its ICT-Core premises in Seville at the start of the month, LifeWatch ERIC played an active part in the project’s 3rd Pilot Network Meeting. The meeting took place in Budapest (Hungary) from 21 – 23 November 2022,  organised by the Hungarian Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (ÖMKi). ALL-Ready is a European Commission-funded HORIZON2020 project addressing the multiple challenges that agricultural systems are facing today, including climate change, biodiversity loss, dwindling resources, and degradation of soil and water quality.

During the meeting, LifeWatch ERIC presented the Agroecology Virtual Lab for Living Labs and Research Infrastructure as a key e-tool to boost the acceleration of the Agroecology transition in the EU, by promoting networking and interaction among the Agroecology community. A training session was also given to the pilot members of the network to test the performance of the first version of the application.

LifeWatch ERIC Agroecology Virtual Lab provides seamless access to all services that the Agroecology community might need (e.g., data collection, sharing and visualisation) to collaborate and co-create new knowledge. These different functionalities will not only allow the community to work with data in a more efficient way, but boost innovative collaboration pathways between Agroecology stakeholders (Living Labs, Research Infrastructures, end-users, policy-makers, citizens, etc.).

To learn more about different projects in which LifeWatch ERIC is involved, please visit the Related Projects page.

LifeWatch ERIC to feature prominently at ICSOC 2022

ICSOC

ICSOC, the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, is the premier international forum for academics, industry researchers, developers, and practitioners to report and share groundbreaking work in service-oriented computing. ICSOC fosters cross-community scientific excellence by gathering experts from various disciplines, such as services science, data science, management science, business-process management, distributed systems, wireless and mobile computing, cloud and edge computing, cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things (IoT), scientific workflows, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and services and software engineering.

This congress provides a high-quality forum for presenting results and discussing ideas that further our knowledge and understanding of the various aspects (e.g. application and system aspects) related to Service Computing with particular focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, IoT, and emerging technologies including quantum computing.

ICSOC 2022, the 20th event in this series, will take place in Seville, Spain from 29 November – 2 December 2022. Inkeeping with ICSOC tradition, it will feature visionary keynote presentations, research and industry presentations, a vision track, workshops, tutorials, and a PhD track.

LifeWatch ERIC is one of the main sponsors and will give two presentations. On Wednesday, 30 November, Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés, ICT Core Operations Coordinator at LifeWatch ERIC, will do a presentation on ‘LifeWatch ERIC distributed e-infrastructure, challenges and goals’. And on Friday, 2 December, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO and head of LifeWatch Spain, will participate in a session in collaboration with the Digital Agency of Andalusia and will talk about ‘LifeWatch ERIC, an Open e-Science & Data Service Oriented distributed panEuropean Research Core Infrastructure: AstarteWatch, from Andalusia to the rest of the World’.

In the organising committee of ICSOC 2022, the honorary chair is Pablo Cortés, General Secretary of Research and Innovation of Junta de Andalucía, Spain. The general co-chairs are Pablo Fernández and Antonio Ruiz (University of Seville, Spain). The programme co-chairs are Brahim Medjahed (University of Michigan-Dearborn, United States); Mario Piattini (University of Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain) and Lina Yao (UNSW, Australia). The local chair is Jose Maria Garcia (University of Seville, Spain) and the finance chair is Bernd Krämer (Fern University, Germany). 

In the five main thematic areas of this international conference, the Service-Oriented Technology Trends Chair is Marco Aiello (University of Stuttgart, Germany); the Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence Chair is Xianzhi Wang (University of Technology Sydney, Australia); the Big Data Analytics Chair is Qi Yu (Rochester Institute of Technology, United States); the Internet of Things Chair is Azadeh Ghari Neiat (Deakin University, Australia); and the Emerging Technologies Chair is Manuel Resinas (University of Seville, Spain). 

New Synergies in the Cartuja Science and Technology Park

PCT Cartuja

At the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core & FEDERTECH headquarters in the Cartuja Science and Technology Park (PCT Cartuja) in Seville, a working meeting took place on Friday 18 November between Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO and Head of LifeWatch Spain, and Francisco Rodríguez Rubio, Director of the Higher Technical School of Engineering of Seville, whose headquarters are also in the PCT Cartuja. The aim of the meeting was to advance agreements between both entities in order to develop research and innovation initiatives in the field of e-biodiversity and the sustainable management of ecosystem services; a synergy that will promote the generation of knowledge and excellence from said science and technology park within the framework of the European Union, with a global vision.

The Higher Technical School of Engineering (ETSi) of the University of Seville is a university centre of international reference in the field of engineering research. Currently, the ETSi university community has more than 5,600 students, and over 500 professors and researchers. It is very well-positioned in international rankings, including the Shanghai ranking, where four of the School’s courses come in as the top positions in Spain, and are among the top 300 worldwide:

  • Instruments Science and Technology, position 50
  • Automation and Control, range 76-100
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Mathematics, range 101-150
  • Energy Sciences and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, range 201-300