Project GREENCOOP: Green Transition through Cooperation models

GREENCOOP Project Iria

The GREENCOOP Project (https://www.lifewatch.eu/greencoop) is designed to revitalise rural areas, by integrating Agroecology and Digital Innovations (ADIs), into novel Rural Communities Business Models (RCBMs). The project started at the end of 2025 and will last for 4 years, bringing together Living Labs from Europe and China into a hybrid network of Rural Innovation Business Communities.

The main ambition of GREENCOOP is to foster the agroecology and digital transition of EU and China farm systems, and use the RCBMs to integrate, interconnect, and make them adaptable to different contexts, boosting and accelerating the adoption rates of ADIs by farmers within the new RCBM.

LifeWatch ERIC leads Work Package 2, with the objective to diagnose the territory, design the Agroecological Digital Demonstrators and generate a data infrastructure that integrates information from the ADIs.

Iria Soto, Senior Scientific Manager at LifeWatch ERIC, has recently talked about this in a short interview published by GREENCOOP: watch the video here!

Harmonising vegetation structure metrics across Europe through Large-scale airborne LiDAR processing

LiDAR

From 11 to 13 March 2026, LifeWatch ERIC was involved in a three-day technical workshop on large-scale airborne LiDAR processing for vegetation structure analysis.

The event was hosted at SustainaLab (University of Amsterdam), and organised by W. Daniel Kissling, Yifang Shi, and Jinhu Wang as part of the EU-funded Mambo Project (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of BiOdiversity), an initiative that develops remote-sensing and AI-based tools to improve biodiversity monitoring across Europe. LifeWatch ERIC, the Netherlands eScience Center, and SURF contributed their expertise to the event programme.

Over the three days, the event brought together 21 researchers, data scientists, and remote sensing specialists working across ecology, forestry, and Earth observation. LifeWatch ERIC VLIC members Zhiming Zhao, Koen Greuell, and Gabriel Pelouze participated with the presentation “Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): a virtual research environment” (Zhiming Zhao) and a hands-on practical session “Laserfarm in NaaVRE” (Gabriel Pelouze, Koen Greuell).

The practical trainings focused on running Laserfarm workflows on HPC infrastructure, using NaaVRE for LiDAR processing, extracting vegetation structure metrics in Google Colab or local Jupyter environments, and delineating individual trees from 3D LiDAR point clouds.

The final discussions explored how to harmonise vegetation structure metrics across Europe, and laid the groundwork for developing a roadmap for large-scale airborne LiDAR processing that supports biodiversity monitoring, forest analysis, and ecosystem research. Participants shared the common goal of moving from local LiDAR processing, to reproducible and scalable workflows.

The event was also an opportunity for LifeWatch ERIC to gather feedback to further improve NaaVRE, especially in terms of scalability, of the ability to customise configurations, support for deep learning models, and overall flexibility and user experience.

To read more about this workshop, visit the official event page: https://www.mambo-project.eu/events/workshop-large-scale-and-scalable-processing-airborne-lidar-vegetation-structure-analysis

Picture from LinkedIn

Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging session at the 7th WCMB.

Animal movement

Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging, is one of LifeWatch ERIC’s Thematic Services Working Groups, networks of Common Facilities and Distributed Centres members, coordinated by the Service Centre.

These WGs implement activities, developments, and physical outcomes of the RI’s Thematic Services in 8 key priority areas (with more to come). Among these, animal tracking is the practice of monitoring and studying animal movements and behaviour in their natural environment from a distance, across spatial and temporal scales, using a suit of tools and technologies.

This practice provides as an advantage the possibility to gather robust data over extended temporal periods and regardless of challenging conditions, with minimal environmental disturbance or interference with the animal behaviour. What makes animal tracking a priority area for LifeWatch ERIC, is the fact that it can offer information about the biology and ecology of organisms that is crucial to establish conservation framework and regulations, and to make predictions on the animals adaptation to human activities.

Jan Reubens (Flanders Marine Institute), Coordinator of this WG, is co-convening a session with Pieterjan Verhelst (Research Institute for Nature and Forest) in occasion of the 7th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity (Bruges, Belgium, 17-20 November 2026).

The Animal movement, behaviour, and biologging panel collects works that offer practical examples and insights on tracking fish with acoustic transmitters, following bird migrations with GPS tags, assessing wildlife presence with camera traps, monitoring presence of marine mammals with passive acoustics, and more.

The session (see 7.3 on this page) falls under the scope of Theme 7 of the conference (together with other five ones). The theme, titled Taking the pulse of the ocean: measuring the current marine biodiversity state and how it impacts us, is open to monitoring programs, networks and activities, to share history, progress, status and lessons learnt. Particular attention is given to the impact of these works on the knowledge of the marine environment, and to data interoperability.

Follow the updates on the programme and read more on the 7th WCMB page: https://www.wcmb2026.org/7-Taking-the-pulse-of-the-ocean-measuring-the-current-marine-biodiversity-state-and-how-it-impacts-us.

BEeS 2026: released the Call for Abstracts topics. Join us in Plovdiv!

LifeWatch ERIC Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference (BEeS) is back. This summer, we have the pleasure of inviting you to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, for a four-day appointment, from 7 to 10 July. LifeWatch Bulgaria, through the Agricultural University-Plovdiv, hosts the third edition of the conference for 2026.

The event will start with a set of Pre-conference workshops on 7 July, while the plenary and contributed sessions will take place from 8 July onwards. Plenary speakers Prof. Vladislav Popov and Prof. Tatyana Bileva (Agricultural University-Plovdiv), Dr. Anne Fouilloux (LifeWatch ERIC), and Prof. Carl Beierkuhnlein (University of Bayreuth/Universidad de Granada), will present sessions on biodiversity conservation, responses to climate change, agroecology, as well as new frontiers for eScience technologies.

Besides the plenary session, the conference welcomes contributions collected through a Call for Abstracts, and a series of Masterclasses and Training sessions on how to use specific LifeWatch ERIC services. The abstracts collected will be published on the conference Book of Abstracts after the event, as well as submitted for publication on the ARPHA platform.

BEeS 2026 also offers some publication opportunities on three different journals, you can follow the updates on this page: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-publication-opportunities.

We welcome participants to submit their abstracts for either a shorter, or longer contributed session (10 or 15 minutes), in one of the selected topics:

  • Uniting science for human, animal, plant and ecosystem health
  • Metagenomics and eDNA for biodiversity and ecosystems
  • Animal traits, behavior and bio-tracking
  • Biodiversity observatories and environmental monitoring
  • Habitat mapping
  • Biogeography: biodiversity conservation across regions and ecosystems
  • Biodiversity and ecosystem responses to climate change
  • Restoration of our oceans and waters
  • Taxonomic data services
  • Semantics and data curation for biodiversity and ecosystem research
  • Soil mission & Microbiology
  • Agroecology

The preliminary programme is available on the BEeS 2026 minisite, and the Call for Abstracts is open until 15 May: submit your work here: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-abstract-submission. The registration form and logistic information will be published very soon. Stay tuned!

About LifeWatch Bulgaria:

Bulgaria joined LifeWatch ERIC in 2022 as one of its eight Distributed Centres (https://www.lifewatch.eu/organisation-governance/bulgaria), where the Agricultural University-Plovdiv is the official national scientific organisation. The Distributed Centre provides services such as lab and field testing, agricultural practices assessment, advanced agrobiodiversity monitoring and land use analysis, as well as open-source collaboration, AI services and plant health infrastructure.

Are cave-sediment bacteria reacting to climate change?

cave-sediment bacteria

Karst subterranean cave sediments are vulnerable habitats, hosting microbial communities that provide crucial services, such as nutrient cycling and pollutant degradation.

So far, these systems have not been studied adequately at the microbial functional level, yet, although karst aquifers currently contribute around 25% of the world’s drinking water. Rather than passive deposits, cave sediments are dynamic microbial habitats that influence fundamental biogeochemical processes through nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon cycling.

A new study on cave microbiology addresses this gap, co-authored by LifeWatch Slovenia member Janez Mulec (Karst Research Institute – ZRC SAZU), together with Lejla Pašić (Sarajevo Medical School – University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology) and Andreea Oarga-Mulec (Materials Research Laboratory – University of Nova Gorica).

The paper, recently published in Frontiers in Microbiology, highlights how cave-sediment bacteria in the the Slovenian eLTER Postojna-Planina Cave System site respond to environmental change, examining key environmental factors such as sediment age and short-term environmental variability.

Slovenian researchers are trying to understand whether these factors have any influence on substrate degradation, taxonomic composition, and on the metabolic potential of bacterial communities. In the midst of hydroclimatic extremes such as floods, droughts, and rising cave temperatures, it is fundamental to understand if these communities are capable of adapting to climate change.

The paper examines two types of sediments that host these microbial habitats: alluvial sediments recently deposited, subject to hydrological and geochemical variability, and ancient palaeo-river deposit, the latter still under-investigated in comparison to the first type, despite its potential to tell us a lot more about microbial ecological functions.

The authors have shown that older sediments can actually function as a geochemical filter: the palaeo-deposit exhibited low taxonomic and functional diversity alongside elevated heavy metal concentrations, consistent with constraints on microbial functioning under long-term geochemical stress. Adaptive traits have been revealed in key taxa, such as Polaromonas, Methylibium, and Beggiatoa.

The study integrates functional and taxonomic approaches, using metagenomic analysis, community-level physiological profiling (CLPP), and sediment geochemistry to assess the roles of sediment age, oxygen availability and temperature, as well as the potential of the microbial communities for applied environmental use.

Read the full article: (DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1724116).

International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2026

Women and girls in science 2026

On 11 February, LifeWatch ERIC joins the global celebrations to raise awareness on the important initiative of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Every year, we have the privilege of working with excellent women scientists, and sometimes we get a chance to feature them in our videos, where they share their knowledge and experience first-hand. To honour this day, we have curated a special Women in Science selection on LifeWatching TV, bringing together and republishing a series of interviews with women researchers.

This collection offers but a glimpse into the impact of women’s contribution on biodiversity and ecosystem research, fields where they often remain underrepresented. We invite you to explore these contents covering topics such as Digital Twins, FAIR data, coastal wetlands restoration, biological invasions, and much more!

The full selection is available here: https://www.lifewatching.tv/women-in-science.

We have also dedicated a special section within our podcast series. You can access it by clicking on the tag “Women in Science”: https://www.lifewatch.eu/podcasts. Enjoy the conversations!

About the International Day of Women and Girls in Science:

This initiative started in 2015, during the inaugural High-Level World Women’s Health and Development Forum, organised by the Royal Academy of Science International Trust (RASIT), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA): https://www.womeninscienceday.org/our-history.html.

The Outcome Declaration of the Forum focused on women’s health and development, reaffirming the importance of physical and mental health of girls and women as a planetary approach to sustainable development, the crucial role of country leadership, and the importance to tackle aspects such as global maternal mortality, uneven progress, gender differences in media representation, among many others.

Every year since 2015 (last year marked the 10th anniversary), this day is internationally celebrated and continues growing global awareness and visibility on the achievements of women in science, and on the need for full and equal access to STEM roles for women and girls.

WoRMS and AlgaeBase: a story of collaboration supporting algal taxonomic research

Taxon match

WoRMS (https://www.marinespecies.org) the World Register of Marine Species supported by LifeWatch Belgium, and AlgaeBase have been collaborating since 2013. Recently, their collaboration has led to a new result: building on the widely used WoRMS taxon-match tool, a dedicated version developed for AlgaeBase has been made available through the LifeWatch Belgium eLab.

AlgaeBase (https://www.algaebase.org) is a database of algae information, including terrestrial, marine and freshwater algae and seagrasses. It was funded in 1996 by the Irish Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Research in Third-level Institutions, and has been maintained since then – mainly through private funds – in support of taxonomic studies. Currently, the database contains over 183,200 species and infraspecific names, supplemented with more than 24,000 images, over 75,000 bibliographic items and more than 611,000 distributional records.

The platform includes several features such as Species Search, Genus Search, Literature Search, and a rich library of images, as well as information about species’ common names, their distribution and more. AlgaeBase also has its own peer-reviewed online journal, Notulae Algarum, as part of its services to the Phycological Community.

Since 2013, thanks to the joint efforts between WoRMS and AlgaeBase, the taxonomic names of marine, freshwater and terrestrial algae have been included in Aphia (WoRMS infrastructure), which allowed WoRMS to further complete its overview of all described marine species.

The synergy and open communication between the two entities has continued, and since 2019 WoRMS has been integrating AlgaeBase content through regular cycles of data harvesting. This mutual collaboration has now led to the creation of AlgaeBase Taxon Match: a dedicated adaptation of the WoRMS taxon-match tool, specifically tailored for AlgaeBase.

As the name suggests, the tool allows the matching of species and infraspecies as part of the LifeWatch Belgium eLab infrastructure, runs directly on AlgaeBase and, importantly, can be combined with other taxon-matching services.

Read more and find out how to access this service on LifeWatch Belgium: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/taxon-match-tool-algaebase-based-worms-taxon-match

Virtual Research Environments and Essential Variables: join LifeWatch ERIC at EGU 2026

EGU 2026

The General Assembly of the European GeoSciences Union (EGU) takes place in Vienna from 3 to 8 May 2026: one of the biggest conferences on environmental and earth sciences.

Every year, the event brings together around 20,000 geoscientists from all over the world, covering all disciplines of the Earth, planetary, and space sciences. The EGU aims to provide a forum where scientists, especially early career researchers, can present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geoscience.

LifeWatch ERIC is taking an active part in this year’s conference, participating in one session, and co-organising another session and a training:

  • The first session, “Co-creating Climate Services: Linking Essential Variables with Actionable Decision Support“, is organised by the ENVRI-Hub Next project, where LifeWatch ERIC is involved in different areas, including training. The session is inspired by the current work in the project, where Essential Variables (EVs) play a key role. It will explore the technical, infrastructural, and policy advancements required to make EVs the foundational language for global environmental cooperation. The session conveners and co-conveners invited scientists, data engineers, social scientists, and policymakers to connect the “essential” with the “actionable”, forging a coherent path from global observation to local solution: https://www.egu26.eu/session/57662
  • Within the context of ENVRI-Hub NEXT, LifeWatch ERIC is also organising a training session (https://www.egu26.eu/session/56062) with trainers Kety Giuliacci , representing INGV and EPOS, and with Zhiming Zhao (Uva/LifeWatch ERIC) and Eleonora Parisi from LifeWatch ERIC. The training, in the form of a short course, will consist in live demonstrations, guided practice, and discussions on how to harness the ENVRI-Hub for interdisciplinary research. You can join the session on 7 May, from 08:30 to 10:15 CEST in Room 2-82, and express your interest through the following form: https://forms.gle/84mPeEDQ53ZbveRQA
  • The second session is titled “Bridging Earth Science Research through Integrated e-Infrastructures and Virtual Research Environments (VREs): From Digital Services to Digital Twins“. Co-convened by Jacco Konijn (LifeWatch ERIC VLIC), it focuses on Virtual Research Environments in Earth and Environmental science, which are at the heart of LifeWatch ERIC services. This session aims to highlight how interoperable e-Infrastructure services can be used to build VREs and Virtual Labs to provide end-to-end support, strengthening research capacity through collaboration between service providers and scientists.
  • Contributions selected for this session will demonstrate practical examples of how digital services, VREs and e-infrastructures enhance research workflows in Earth and environmental science, present innovative integration approaches, highlight technical implementations, and share lessons learnt and new challenges: https://www.egu26.eu/session/56062
  • Members of LifeWatch ERIC’s VLIC will also present in this session the poster “A Maturity Model for Facilitating Virtual Lab’s Co-Development“, proposing a Virtual Lab Maturity Model that facilitates a common language across disciplines and ensures alignment with FAIR principles.

For more information on EGU 2026 visit the official event page: https://www.egu26.eu

RECUP-DAS: the new €10.4M project to restore the Tinto and Odiel river basins

RECUP-DAS

LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be part of the new funded project RECUP-DAS, through an agreement signed together with the Andalusian Regional Governement and the University of Huelva.

With a total budget of 10.4 million euros, RECUP-DAS is a strategic initiative funded under ERDF Andalusia 2021-2027, that promotes the environmental recovery of the Tinto and Odiel river basins, two of the systems that most suffered the acid drainage from historical mining (the name “Río Tinto” refers to the reddish colour of its waters from iron and other metals dissolved into them).

This initiative entails the collaboration of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development in terms of leadership on the sustainable management of water, in collaboration with the Andalusian knowledge system and LifeWatch ERIC as scientific infrastructure specialised in biodiversity and ecosystem.

The project follows an innovative and sustainable approach, aligned with the regional hydrological planning. The Directorate General responsible for water resources will oversee the construction of a DAS technology-based plant for the treatment of acid mine drainage and environmental restoration of the affected areas, with a gradual recovery of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.

DAS stands for “Dispersed Alkaline Substrate“, a technology developed by the “Tharsis” Research Group of the University of Huelva, which will be improved and optimised throughout the project: this passive treatment system neutralised acidity and removes dissolved metals in contaminated water without the need for continuous energy or permanent addition of reagents.

With a total budget of 5.9 million euros assigned, LifeWatch ERIC will lead the digitisation of the system and the development of a digital twin, which will allow the simulation of different operating scenarios to optimise efficiency, and improve decision-making along the plant operation.

In addition, LifeWatch ERIC will also be responsible for the dissemination of project’s results, ensuring that knowledge generated can be transferred and replicated in future restoration initiatives, regional, national and international.

The main expected results of RECUP-DAS are a significant reduction in the pollutant load in affected waters, improvement of the ecological status of the intervened watercourses, and the generation of scientific and technical knowledge applicable to basins in similar conditions. Solid waste generated from the treatment process will be the object of further analysis on how to potentially valorise it, within the framework of circular economy.

Stay tuned to know more about RECUP-DAS!

A new understanding of nature: ITINERIS 2-day training on VREs and presentation of the final platform

ITINERIS

ITINERIS (https://itineris.cnr.it/) is an initiative started in November 2022 with the objective to support the Italian integrated system of Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the environmental domain, under the coordination of the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy.

One of its main outputs is the ITINERIS HUB, a gateway to the wide range of data, cutting-edge facilities, analytical tools, and services from these RIs, facilitating observation and study of processes in the atmosphere, marine domain, terrestrial biosphere, and geosphere. Italy is in fact actively involved in all major pan-European Environmental Research Infrastructures, and hosts other nationally relevant RIs, demanding for coordinated actions to integrate, interlink and harmonise their activities.

The ITINERIS HUB includes digital tools such as datasets, research products, and training resources among others, as well as Virtual Research Environments (VREs), that is, web-based, community-oriented working environments that enable researchers to work remotely and interactively.

Now in its final phases, ITINERIS has recently launched a VREs training event in two sessions, on 27 and on 30 January. The event will be an opportunity to train the platform super-admins and admins on two newly launched VREs developed in collaboration with LifeWatch ERIC by EquiUP SRL. The first one, Biomass VRE, helps study aquatic and terrestrial biomass dynamics in relation to climatic, ecological, and anthropogenic factors, while the second one, Phyto VRE, allows phytoplankton data computation and analysis.

After the training events, the final version of the platform will be presented to its end-users in another session on Friday 30 January at 15:00, together with some practical case studies to help in the adoption of its tools.

Researchers are just beginning to understand the series of intricate relations governing our planet: this is one of modern science’s biggest challenges in the face of today’s critical issues. Platforms like ITINERIS HUB can help elaborate and interpret the huge quantity of data available from different sources and offer a new understanding of nature.