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. 

Read the full white paper here: https://riojournal.com/article/168765

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

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.

European Agroecology Partnership members meet in The Netherlands

agroecology partnership meeting

LifeWatch ERIC actively participated in the in-person WP5 European Agroecology Partnership meeting, “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures”, held at Wageningen University & Research from 18 to 20 June 2025.

The meeting, co-organised by WUR and LifeWatch ERIC, brought together key partners to review progress on monitoring and data management strategies for assessing agroecological transitions in Europe. A central focus was on enhancing cross-task collaboration to support the design and implementation of sustainable farming systems across the continent.

Hosted at the WUR Impulse Building, the meeting included plenary sessions, cross-task workshops, and a field visit to the organic dairy farm De Hooilanden and market garden De Lichtveen.

Representing LifeWatch ERIC, José Manuel Ávila and Iria Soto, leaders of Work Package 5, coordinated and moderated several sessions, facilitating strategic discussions to shape the Partnership’s second phase.

The Agroecology Partnership, funded under Horizon Europe, supports multi-actor innovation through a unique integration of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures. It fosters collaboration among scientists, farmers, advisors, policymakers, and citizens to co-create resilient and sustainable food systems.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem responses to Climate Change: scientists in Lecce discuss the invisible cost of the ecological crisis

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses

The international workshop “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change” took place on 12–13 June 2025 at MUST Museum in Lecce.

The National Biodiversity Future Centre (NBFC), Italy’s first national research and innovation centre for biodiversity, funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through NextGeneration EU funds, organised the workshop in collaboration with LifeWatch ERIC’s Working Group on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change.

Climate change is deeply altering the living conditions of organisms across the planet, influencing their geographic distribution, abundance, and even the daily cost of survival. These effects are especially severe for species which cannot regulate their body temperature and must expend more resources to maintain metabolism and behaviour in warmer, more unstable environments.

The consequences of these changes extend far beyond the ecological sphere. They impact key ecosystem functions that support human well-being, potentially affecting economic growth (GDP) and the achievement of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Acknowledging that climate change does not act in isolation but reshapes entire ecological contexts, the workshop focused on assessing possible ecological responses and exploring ways to integrate them into adaptation and mitigation strategies.

One of the central questions guiding the discussions was: How will biodiversity’s response to climate change affect our economy and society in the coming decades?
The reflection was based on a simple yet crucial premise: we cannot safeguard our well-being without first safeguarding the ecosystems we depend on.

The full programme remain available at:
https://www.lifewatch.eu/thematic-services-working-groups/wg-climate-change/meetings/workshop-biodiversity-and-ecosystem-responses-to-climate-change

Noise pollution in the North Sea: Marine Environment Service and DG Shipping launch awareness campaign supported by LifeWatch VLIZ

The North Sea is one of the busiest seas in the world. All this human activity creates a lot of noise underwater, that can have harmful consequences for marine mammals and other organisms. This noise pollution originates primarily through shipping, explosive ordnance disposal, sonar, the construction of wind farms, and sand extraction and dredging.

The Marine Environment Service (FPS Public Health) and the Shipping Directorate-General (FPS Mobility), with the support of LifeWatch Belgium (VLIZ), are collaborating on a campaign to raise awareness about underwater noise pollution among the wider public and promote measures, that fortunately exist, to limit noise pollution.

This is a very important objective: for many marine species, such as marine mammals, fish, and even invertebrates, hearing is a crucial sense to survive in the dark underwater environment. Sound waves help these species perform vital functions such as orientation, communication, finding food and reproduction.

In addition, they propagate much more efficiently underwater than in the air, as they are less attenuated and move up to five times faster, posing a real threat to the marine wildlife in the Northern Sea.

The campaign is part of the OSPAR Convention collective actions to reduce noise pollution, that include the application of measures such as improved ship design, reduced vessel speed, a bubble curtain during pile driving, or the gradual startup of sonar devices or machinery used for pile driving.

VLIZ, the Flanders Marine Institute, is contributing to this plan with the help of LifeWatch Belgium and currently developing a library of long-term underwater sounds from the North Sea, set to launch in the summer of 2025. Well-described sound events will be ingested by the library and available according to the FAIR data principles.

Want to learn more? Read the full article on LifeWatch Belgium: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/noise-pollution-north-sea or visit the SoundLib website.

Upscaling biodiversity

upscaling biodiversity bill kunin

“Biodiversity is intrinsically scale-dependent”. Bill Kunin, Professor at the University of Leeds, in this second BioDT Talks tackles one of spatial ecology’s biggest challenges: how do we accurately upscale biodiversity data?

One of the reason that makes upscaling biodiversity challenging is that biodiversity is an unusual variable. Unlike simple additive variables, biodiversity is subadditive: two areas with 6 and 4 species don’t necessarily contain 10 species together due to potential overlap in the species you had in the different samples. This makes scaling from local observations to regional or global assessments particularly complex.

Why does upscaling biodiversity matter? Prof. Kunin explains how it helps us to estimate biodiversity in little-know areas; to predict larger-scale effects from fine-scale experiments; to monitor biodiversity changes across multiple scales; to model spatially realistic futures (e.g. developing more accurate digital twins of ecosystems, linking local and coarser scale patterns); to understand how threats like habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and climate change impact biodiversity differently at various scales.

Enjoy the video on LifeWatching Channel website!

BioDT is a research project funded by the European Union that aims to develop a digital twin prototype for the study and analysis of biodiversity, in support of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. The Biodiversity Digital Twin prototype provides advanced models for simulation and prediction capabilities, through practical use cases addressing critical issues related to global biodiversity dynamics.
The BioDT Talks is the new 6-part series illustrating how data science and technology are transforming our approach to the biodiversity crisis.
More information on the BioDT Project HERE.
Watch the full playlist on YouTube and find out more!