Italy

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LifeWatch Italy

University of Salento
via prov. Lecce Monteroni sn,
73100 Lecce, Italy

Italy is one of the founders of LifeWatch ERIC and hosts its Service Centre. LifeWatch ERIC has always been strongly supported by the national scientific community, as well as regional and national institutions, since Italy is a biodiversity hotspot in Europe, with more than 57,400 animal and 6,500 plant species. Italian landscapes and protected areas are natural laboratories for biodiversity and ecosystem research.

The LifeWatch Italy webportal provides a networking interface for the biodiversity and ecosystem community, offering learning and training opportunities, semantic resources and data, ICT services & VREs, supporting research activities and science-based policymaking.

What We Do

Semantics

LW ITA implements controlled vocabularies and ontologies to support the interoperability of different data infrastructures.

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Education

LW ITA provides platforms and learning environments combined with gaming resources, specifically designed for students.

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Data & Metadata

LW ITA makes data and metadata accessible, interpretable and reusable.

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Citizen Science

LW ITA is currently working on the release of its brand new Citizen Science platform.

Services

LW ITA ICT provides and shares ICT Services for the study of biodiversity and ecosystems.

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VREs

LW ITA develops and makes available VREs dedicated to major scientific issues (e.g. alien species, Phytoplankton).

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The Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUR) and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) lead the Italian contribution to LifeWatch ERIC and the activities of its distributed centre, in close cooperation with the Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea Protection.

Organised as a Joint Research Unit (JRU), LifeWatch Italy is coordinated by the department of Earth system science and environmental technologies of the CNR. The General Assembly and the Coordination and Management committees oversee its governance.

The JRU counts among its many members the most important institutions active in this domain, including the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic (Castelporziano Presidential Estate), the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station and the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari, as well as many universities, regional agencies and private bodies (please see here for the full list of members).

Projects

The European Scientific Research Game Project

ENVRI-FAIR

CReATIVE-B

News from LifeWatch Italy

Research Grants at University of Salento

The University of Salento (Puglia, Italy) has published a number of calls for applications for research grants, in association with LifeWatchPLUS and LifeWatch Italy. These include: “Development of geospatial models supporting web services for the study of biodiversity and ecosystem change scenarios” (21/01/22)"Semantic technologies for biodiversity and ecosystem research to support the LifeWatchPLUS distributed Data Centre and the LifeWatch ERIC community” (16/01/22)“Multimedia developments for biodiversity and ecosystem research” (21/01/22) Please see the LifeWatch Italy Jobs page for more information. To see opportunities available with LifeWatch ERIC, click here.

LifeWatch ERIC Executive Board members to speak at the ‘XXX° Rassegna del mare’

From 21 – 24 October, the Italian city of Gallipoli will host the XXX° Rassegna del mare (30th Festival of the Sea), organised by MareAmico, with the patronage of the Italian National Research Council and the contribution of several LifeWatch ERIC experts, scientists and representatives. This edition, which will be held in-person in compliance with anti-Covid regulations, will be based on the topic “Recognition and protection of the sea and marine resource management”. With a range of activities taking place, the goal of the event is to raise awareness among institutions (the EU, competent ministries, the Puglia Region and local...

LifeWatch Italy fellowship

The University of Salento has published the call for applications to the Development and management of Cloud and HPC infrastructures fellowship for LifeWatch Italy.

EcoLogicaMente

The EcoLogicaMente platform, developed by LifeWatch Italy in partnership with the Italian Society of Ecology (SItE) and University of Salento (UniSalento), is a web-based tool launched in 2021 to allow visitors to explore a broad range of issues in the field of ecology. Primarily addressed to Italian school students and teachers, from Primary through to High School, the in-depth topics contain various types of material including texts, videos, presentations, live lessons, games, questionnaires, and practical activity sheets for work in the field or in the laboratory. The EcoLogicaMente study topics and materials have been compiled by university professors and experts...

World Conference on Marine Biodiversity 2020

The World Conference on Marine Biodiversity 2020 was successfully presented online between Sunday 13 – Wednesday 15 December 2020, by the University of Auckland, New Zealand. A state-of-the-art virtual conference platform, that facilitated interactive plenary sessions, live panel discussions, filmed presentations, e-posters, a meeting hub and virtual exhibition areas, attracted over 400 participants. LifeWatch ERIC was privileged to be able to support the international event as platinum sponsor. Chief Executive Officer Christos Arvanitidis, in a pre-recorded video message broadcast at the start of proceedings, warmly welcomed the participants, wishing them good luck and a great remote conference, inviting them to support the United...

Castelporziano Estate Species Checklist

The Castelporziano Presidential Estate, just outside Rome, Italy, is one of the three residences of the President of the Italian Republic. Dating from the fifth century, and declared a State Nature Reserve in 1999, the grounds at Castelporziano cover nearly 6000 hectares and are home to majestic oaks, laurel groves and free-roaming deer, foxes, badgers and wild boar. The Estate has now made its biodiversity dataset of 6329 taxa accessible through the LifeWatch Italy data portal and the LifeWatch ERIC metadata catalogue. The dataset is the result of the "Systematisation and geospatial analysis of the environmental monitoring data of the Castelporziano...

CNR Senior Fellowship with PhD announced

The Italian National Research Council Research Institute on Terrestrial Ecosystems (CNR-IRET) has issued a call for applications for a new Senior Fellowship with PhD position, based at the Research Unit (URT) CNR-IRET at the University of Salento in Lecce, Italy, under the supervision of professor Alberto Basset. Applications close on 30 November 2020. With an initial research grant for two years, the successful candidate will conduct research activities within the Internal Joint Initiative of LifeWatch ERIC, on the topic of: "Short- and long-term responses of aquatic ecosystems to alien species colonisation and invasiveness". The research program covers: Data mining on species and...

SItE Roundtable event

When the annual Congress of the Italian Society of Ecology (Società Italiana di Ecologia - SItE), planned for 14-18 September in Lecce had to be postponed until next year because of Covid-19, the organising committee, in conjunction with LifeWatch Italy and the Ecology Laboratory at the University of Salento, decided to offer its members a day of online Roundtables entitled "SItE – Towards Lecce 2021" to celebrate Ecology Day on 14 September. Around 300 registrations were made to follow the 20 presentations offered across a comprehensive range of topics: • Ecosystem health and chemical mixture risk assessment and management • Ecosystems...

Four post-doc positions at URT CNR IRET Lecce

Four post-doc positions have just been announced at URT-CNR IRET in Lecce for research activities in the framework of LifeWatch Italy. The application deadline for all these calls is 10 September 2020. Please check these attached documents for more information: Development of data quality control and data analysis services in the context of e-Science Semantic technologies to support the distributed data centres of LifeWatch in biodiversity and ecosystem research Development of a Virtual Research Environment for the implementation of scientific applications in a distributed cloud infrastructure Harmonisation and analysis of morpho-functional trait data and the organisation of phytoplankton guilds.

S4BioDiv 2020

3rd International Workshop on Semantics for Biodiversity The S4BioDiv 3rd International Workshop on Semantics for Biodiversity, to be held in Bolzano, Italy, on 16 September, has issued a call for papers. Authors are invited to submit for inclusion topics related the application and development of semantic technologies to support research in the biodiversity and related domains. In the light of the coronavirus crisis, the conference may need to be held virtually. The final format of the conference will be determined in June. Biodiversity deals with heterogeneous data and concepts generated from a large number of disciplines in order to build a...

5th LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly

The Dirk Bouts Building in the Flemish Administrative Centre (VAC) in Leuven, Belgium, was the scene for the 5th LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly, from 11–12 December 2019, chaired by Gert Verreet. Composed of the representatives from all full Member States and observers, the purpose of General Assembly Meetings, the highest governing body of LifeWatch ERIC, is to set the overall direction and to supervise the development and operation of LifeWatch ERIC. At the heart of this 5th General Assembly lies the prototype of the LifeWatch ERIC Platform, an integrated initiative of LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities presented by the CTO, Dr...

2nd Dahlem-Type Workshop

The LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative was launched in October 2019 to design and construct a Virtual Research Environment capable of processing and modelling available data on one of the planet's most burning biodiversity issues, the proliferation of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS), in order to help mitigate their impacts. Development of a new Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is essential to further integrate the tools and services available in the LifeWatch ERIC web portal. The process will allow stakeholders greater ability to develop their research activities within the e-Science Infrastructure, whilst also clearly demonstrating the added value that LifeWatch ERIC's...

1st Dahlem-type Workshop

LifeWatch ERIC just launched an Internal Joint Initiative (IJI) focusing on the topic of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS) with the aim of developing new dedicated Virtual Research Environments. The IJI kicked off with the organisation of the LifeWatch ERIC 1st Dahlem-type Workshop: Current and future challenges of NIS in Europe, which took place from 14th to 18th October, in the Casa de la Ciencia, and the V. De Madariaga Foundation, in Seville, Spain. The choice of the Dahlem-type1 workshop stems from the desire of the infrastructure to use the most participative interdisciplinary approach in the search for new perspectives to...

ISEM Global Conference 2019

The biennial conference of ISEM, the International Society of Ecological Modellers, is truly global. From the level of interaction at the LifeWatch ERIC stand in Salzburg, Austria, from 1–5 October, it was clear that that ecologists, modellers and statisticians had come from all over the world, with 52 countries represented. LifeWatch ERIC was the only infrastructure with a stand at the event, and the tools, services and catalogues available through the LifeWatch ERIC portal were of great interest to the 414 delegates present, all involved in the use of ecological models and systems ecology. Thanks to the activities organised at...

European Researchers’ Night

September is a busy month in the LifeWatch ERIC calendar, not only for the many scientific congresses, but also because of the increased outreach to the general public, students and families in particular, to interest them in the science behind biodiversity and ecosystem research. Within the framework of the European Researchers' Night, on 27 September 2019, events were staged in member countries to highlight the impact of research on our daily lives. As a record 7.6 million people took to the streets in Climate Strike protests around the world, universities, laboratories and museums across Europe were opening their doors to promote...