One Biodiversity Knowledge Hub to link them all: the II BiCIKL General Assembly

BiCIKL General Assembly


The Horizon 2020 – funded Project BiCIKL, in which LifeWatch ERIC is a partner, has reached its halfway stage. The partners gathered in Plovdiv (Bulgaria) from 22 – 25 October for the Second General Assembly, brilliantly organised by Pensoft Publishers. 

The BiCIKL project will launch a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in the biodiversity and life sciences based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services. BiCIKL’s goal is to create a centralised place to connect all key biodiversity data by interlinking 15 research infrastructures and their databases. The 3-year European Commission-supported initiative kicked off in 2021 and involves 14 key natural history institutions from 10 European countries.

BiCIKL is keeping pace as expected (16 out of 48 deliverables have been submitted, 9 are in progress/under review and due in a few days, 21 out of 48 milestones have been achieved).

The hybrid format of the meeting enabled a wider range of participants, which resulted in robust discussions on the next steps of the project, such as the implementation of additional technical features of the FAIR Data Place (FAIR being an abbreviation for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This online platform – the key and final product of the partnership and the BiCIKL initiative – is meant to provide scientists with all types of biodiversity data “at their fingertips”. 

This data includes information, such as detailed images, DNA, physiology and past studies concerning a specific species and its ‘relatives’, to name a few. Currently, the issue is that all those types of biodiversity data have so far been scattered across various databases, which in turn have been missing meaningful and efficient interconnectedness.

Additionally, the FAIR Data Place, developed within the BiCIKL project, is to give researchers access to plenty of training modules to guide them through the different services.

Halfway through the duration of BiCIKL, the project is at a turning point, where crucial discussions between the partners are playing a central role in the refinement of the FAIR Data Place design. Most importantly, they are tasked with ensuring that their technologies work efficiently with each other, in order to seamlessly exchange, update and share the biodiversity data every one of them is collecting and taking care of. 

By Year 3 of the BiCIKL project, the partners agree, when those infrastructures and databases become efficiently interconnected to each other, scientists studying the Earth’s biodiversity across the world will be in a much better position to build on existing research and improve the way and the pace at which nature is being explored and understood. At the end of the day, knowledge is the stepping stone for the preservation of biodiversity and humankind itself.

“Needless to say, it’s an honour and a pleasure to be the coordinator of such an amazing team spanning as many as 14 partnering natural history and biodiversity research institutions from across Europe, but also involving many global long-year collaborators and their infrastructures, such as Wikidata, GBIF, TDWG, Catalogue of Life to name a few. I see our meeting in Plovdiv as a practical demonstration of our eagerness and commitment to tackle the long-standing and technically complex challenge of breaking down the silos in the biodiversity data domain. It is time to start building freeways between all biodiversity data, across (digital) space, time and data types. After the last three days that we spent together in inspirational and productive discussions, I am as confident as ever that we are close to providing scientists with much more straightforward routes to not only generate more biodiversity data, but also build on the already existing knowledge to form new hypotheses and information ready to use by decision- and policy-makers. One cannot stress enough how important the role of biodiversity data is in preserving life on Earth. These data are indeed the groundwork for all that we know about the natural world” – said BiCIKL’s project coordinator Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft, a scholarly publisher and technology provider company. 

“The point is: do we want an integrated structure or do we prefer federated structures?” – says Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC – “What are the pros and cons of the two options? It’s essential to keep the community united and allied because we can’t afford any information loss and the stakeholders should feel at home with the Project and the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub.”

“We are a brand new community, and we are in the middle of the growth process” – says Joe Miller, GBIF– “We would like to already have answers, but it’s good to have this kind of robust discussion to build on a good basis. We must find the best solution to have linkages between infrastructures and be able to maintain them in the future because the BKH is the location to gather the community around best practices, data and guidelines on how to use the BiCIKL services… In order to engage even more partners to fill the eventual gaps in our knowledge.”

“BiCIKL is leading data infrastructure communities through some exciting and important developments”, says Guy Cochrane, EMBL-EBI. “In an era of biodiversity change and loss, leveraging scientific data fully will allow the world to catalogue what we have now, to track and understand how things are changing and to build the tools that we will use to conserve or remediate. The challenge is that the data come from many streams – molecular biology, taxonomy, natural history collections, biodiversity observation – that need to be connected and intersected to allow scientists and others to ask real questions about the data. In its first year, BiCIKL has made some key advances to rise to this challenge.”

“As a partner, we, at  Biodiversity Information Standards – TDWG, are very enthusiastic that our standards are implemented in BiCIKL and serve to link biodiversity data.  We know that joining forces and working together is crucial to building efficient infrastructures and sharing knowledge”, says Deborah Paul, chair of the Biodiversity Information Standards-TDWG.

The project will go on with the first Round Table of experts in December and the publications of the projects who participated in the Open Call and will be founded (https://bicikl-project.eu/open-call-projects) at the beginning of the next year.

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

A Focus on Gender-Responsive Policy at the Women for the Mediterranean Conference

Women for the Mediterranean

LifeWatch ERIC International Gender Officer, Africa Zanella, took part this week in the Women for the Mediterranean Conference in Madrid, where Union for the Mediterranean member states committed on Wednesday to strengthening the role of women in society in response to regional crises. Ms Zanella, who is also CEO of CGSE, as well as Observer and Gender Focal Point for the CIF, moderated the panel “Gender Equality and Climate Change: women as agents for change and stakeholders instead of vulnerable groups”, followed by participation in the panel “Gender-responsive finance at scale for climate and environment action”.

A recurring theme in her speeches throughout the day was calling for attention to language, and she opened by rejecting the ubiquitous term “climate change”, calling for the phenomenon to be referred to as the “climate crisis”. Also in common with her following presentations, she called for more gender analysis into research and policy, explaining her role within LifeWatch ERIC to implement a Gender Equity Plan, which is now a requirement for participation in EU research funding programmes, and use of tools such as IGAR to increase equality and wellbeing in the research infrastructure, which provides science research facilities and services to scientists investigating biodiversity and ecosystem functions towards addressing key societal challenges linked to climate change.

For the first panel, she introduced panellists: Saira Ahmed, Programme Management Officer at UNDRR, Blanca Moreno-Dodson, Director of the CMI, UNOPS, Yasmine Seghirate, Policy and Communication Officer at CIHEAM, and Maggie Refaat, Regional Gender Specialist at FAO. Some of the key points the experts spoke about were the desegregation of data for effective gender analysis of policy, due to the large diversity within genders, and about increased information exchange between universities and research infrastructures in order to develop equality plans and support women who want to become scientists.

Next, Africa Zanella invited the panellists to choose the point of action from the Gender Declaration which they believe would make the best change for women. Points mentioned included training and research, due to the important of having data which reveals how climate change is affecting women; monitoring changes to legislation, which largely needs to be reviewed in order to incorporate gender component; the importance of having reliable data on climate financing, to encourage the private sector to collaborate with public sector; gender transformative approaches, such as increased reporting on women’s access to land ownership and access to knowledge; and increased investment in a gender-sensitiiveresponse to disasters, which would involve more resources made directly available to grassroots women’s organisations.

When as a panellist the Gender Officer was asked how the Union for the Mediterranean roadmap could be improved, she stated the stark fact that only 0.04% of climate funding is dedicated into gender, citing the problem as a bureaucratic resistance to change globally. Moreover, in line with her previous statements, Africa Zanella called for an end to tokenism, explaining that women are not are homogenous group, and further factors must be taken into account, such as sector, region, etc.: requiring a more thorough and detailed analytic approach to developing gender-responsive policy. Finally, Ms Zanella mentioned ongoing research being undertaken by CIF World Bank, for which she is part of the reference group, which shows that what women in developing countries want is a voice, so they can give their perspective and decide their own fate.

About Union for the Mediterranean

The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) is an intergovernmental Euro-Mediterranean organisation which brings together all countries of the European Union and 15 countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. UfM’s mission is to enhance regional cooperation, dialogue and the implementation of projects and initiatives with tangible impact on our citizens, with an emphasis on young people and women, in order to address the three strategic objectives of the region: stability, human development and integration.

Women for the Mediterranean

Pathways to Improved Resilience through Digital and Remote Access

eRImote Workshop

The eRImote project kicked off in June this year, devoted to considering solutions for digital and remote service provision across Research Infrastructure domains and looking for transferable practices and new developments that will improve accessibility and resilience. The second eRImote workshop, on 24 and 25 October 2022, focused on Remote Operations of RI services, including quality management, and questions of data and access security. Coherent with eRImote’s mission the workshop was offered remotely.

The final panel discussion on the first day was moderated by Johanna Bischoff of Euro BioImaging and featured LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer Juan Miguel González-Aranda, alongside Christina Redfield from the University of Oxford and Robert Harmel of EU-OPENSCREEN. Dr González-Aranda’s presentation was entitled “Remote Operations of Infrastructure Services”, but the logic built up from a compelling and disturbing overview of the biodiversity crisis we all face.

Referencing IUCN Red List categories of endangered species data and extinctions since 1500, the presentation emphasised the essential importance of addressing the big environmental challenges by supporting knowledge-based strategic solutions to biodiversity loss. Only though large-scale monitoring can we understand the ecosystem functions and services that nourish life and benefit humans.  

LifeWatch ERIC is the structural tool within the European Research Area that supplies scientific knowledge complete enough to support political decision-making. Combining datasets, service and tools in state-of-the-art virtual research environments, LifeWatch ERIC’s Big Data, AI, HPC-Grid Cloud computing, backed with Blockchain, working with other Research Infrastructures, can deliver the goods.

LifeWatch Greece integrated into GOOS Biology and Ecosystems GeoNode

GeoNode BioEco Portal

The LifeWatch Greece national node, led by HCMR, hosts a large and continuously updated database with biodiversity data collected from monitoring projects throughout the Mediterranean (MedOBIS). As of September, it has been integrated as a layer of GeoNode BioEco Portal as a monitoring project for Greek Bioversity.

The GOOS BioEco Portal is a publicly available tool to monitor the status of the marine biological observing system. The GEONODE is the back-end interface where registered users can upload, edit and manage their monitoring program details including which EOVs (Essential Ocean Variables) and EBVs (Essential Biodiversity Variables) are monitored; spatial and temporal information; status of the program; data availability and licences; standardisation and protocols; as well as links to applications, tools and outputs based on the collected observations. This GeoNode is hosted and maintained by the secretariat of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) based at the IOC Project Office for IODE in Ostend, Belgium as a service to support the Global Ocean Observing System Biology and Ecosystem Panel.

You can find the original article on the LifeWatch Greece website.

Second open access data paper published in the Biodiversity Data Journal

procambarus clarkii

The “LifeWatch ERIC Collection of Data and Services Papers” published in the Biodiversity Data Journal is dedicated to the resources and assets developed, upgraded and used during the implementation of the Internal Joint Initiative (IJI), our flagship project focused non-indigenous and invasive species (NIS). Following the debut paper “An individual-based dataset of carbon and nitrogen isotopic data of Callinectes sapidus in invaded Mediterranean waters” (Di Muri et al.) in January, a second open-access data paper in this series was published on 20 October 2022, entitled “Individual and population-scale carbon and nitrogen isotopic values of Procambarus clarkii in invaded freshwater ecosystems” (Di Muri et al.).

Freshwater ecosystems are amongst the most threatened habitats on Earth; nevertheless, they support about 9.5% of known global biodiversity while covering less than 1% of the globe’s surface. One such threat are NIS such as the Louisiana crayfish, Procambarus clarkii. Crayfish species are widely-distributed freshwater invaders and, while alien species introductions occur mostly accidentally, alien crayfish are often released deliberately into new areas for commercial purposes. Native to the south United States and north Mexico, P. clarkii has been introduced in Europe, Asia and Africa, having negative impacts in the majority of invaded habitats where it became dominant, meaning it had become essential to evaluate the ecological consequences and quantify its impact.

The paper presents two geo-referenced datasets of isotopic signatures of the Louisiana crayfish and its animal and vegetable prey in invaded inland and brackish waters. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this effort represents the first attempt to collate in standardised datasets the sparse isotopic information of P. clarkii available in literature. The datasets provide a spatially explicit resolution of its trophic ecology and can be used to address a variety of ecological questions concerning its ecological impact on recipient aquatic food webs.

The research was carried out within the context of the IJI, more specifically the ‘Crustaceans Workflow’, one of the validation cases used to develop an interdisciplinary Virtual Research Environment that utilises disruptive technologies to deal with the impacts of NIS on native species, genetic diversity, habitats, ecosystem functioning and services, and to inform current practices in environmental management and policy implementation. Stay tuned for the next paper!


ACCESS THE PAPER HERE

LifeWatch ERIC in Meeting on Disruptive Technologies

Disruptive technologies

Tomorrow morning, on Wednesday 19 October, LifeWatch ERIC will have the opportunity to meet and establish relationships with other creators and promoters of disruptive technologies, at the online B2B meeting organised by PTE Disruptive of the Association of Science and Technology Parks of Spain (APTE) focused on opportunities in the biotech sector (in Spanish).

LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, will present in a slot from 10:40 – 11:00 CEST. In his presentation, he will talk about the range of disruptive technologies used by LifeWatch ERIC – the virtual infrastructure available to anyone who wishes to support research on biodiversity and the valorisation of ecosystem services with reliable data. 

Other participants include: Felipe Romera, president of Malaga TechPark and APTE, who will present the Spanish Platform of Disruptive Technologies; María Angeles Ferré, responsible for scientific-technical thematic programmes at the State Research Agency, who will talk about the aid programmes; Gabriel Anzaldi Varas, director of technological scientific development at EURECAT, who will speak about digital-bio technological convergence and its applications; and Raquel Álvarez Fernández, head of statistics and intelligence at the Spanish Association of Biocompanies (AseBio), who will discuss business opportunities in the biotech sector. 

The meeting will also see presentations from three company representatives with practical examples on the use of disruptive technologies: Exheus CEO, Teresa Tarragó; Zymvol Biomodeling SL CTO Maria Fátima Lucas; and Honey.Ai COO Iratxe Perales. APTE is funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain through the AIE.

Interested persons are invited to register for the event using the form (in Spanish).

Bilateral meetings will be held after the presentations and will not be streamed.

​

Fortifying Spanish-Portuguese Cooperation on Technology for Research at IBERGRID 2022

IBERGRID 2022

IBERGRID 2022, the 11th Iberian Grid Conference, took place 10–13 October at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal. IBERGRID stands for the Iberian Grid Structure, federating computing and data resources across the Iberian area to support research and innovation. The theme of the conference was “Delivering Innovative Computing and Data Services for Research”, and LifeWatch ERIC had a strong presence at the event, with a presentation “EOSC Activities in the Environmental Sciences”  from ICT-Core e-Infrastructure Operations Coordinator Antonio José Sáenz on behalf of CEO Christos Arvanitidis and CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda, as part of the EOSC tripartite event which took place on day 1, and a two-part workshop on “IBERLifeWatch” – focusing on a good practices approach for scientific, technology and innovation communities and on funding opportunities for Spanish-Portuguese cooperation on day 2 and day 4.

During the IBERLifeWatch workshop, LifeWatch ERIC was able to highlight its collaboration several prestigious research entities, with engaging presentations from representatives from FCT, CSIC, MIRRI ERIC, the University of Huelva, the University of Granada, the FCCN Unit, LIP, GBIF, the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, the Spanish government, the Junta de Andalucía, the Interreg Spain-Portugal programme, the LIFE programme, Estacão Biológica de Mértola, University of Porto, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, ADRAL, the University of Aveiro, the University of Minho and many more, as well as coordinators of the Spanish and Portuguese nodes of LifeWatch ERIC itself. State-of-the-art LifeWatch ERIC tools were presented, such as LifeBlock and Tesseract, alongside important ERDF projects in the region involving the participation of the infrastructure, such as SmartFood and Smart EcoMountains, as well as wide-reaching agroecology initiatives such as ALL-Ready. To learn about the technology underpinning these projects, please see the presentations below.

LifeWatch ERIC would like to thank event organisers University of Algarve, LIP, INCD and CSIC. The Iberian Peninsula is a biodiversity hotspot and it is key that synergistic initiatives and projects such as those mentioned during the meeting are maintained and expanded, and IBERGRID 2022 provided the perfect opportunity to acknowledge and reinforce cross-border collaboration.

To see photos from the event, please see our gallery.

Presentations from the IBERLifeWatch workshop are available below:


José Manuel Ávila | Innovation on Agroecology to support a transition to more sustainable and resilient agrifood systems

Kety Cáceres Falcón & Sofía Vaz | Funding European opportunities for ES-PT collaboration

Estação Biológica de Mértola | Presentation

Juan Miguel González-Aranda | IBERLifeWatch: A scientific, technology and innovation Communities of good practices approach

Pablo Guerrero, Jaime Lobo & Emilio de Leon | Improving the environmental monitoring cycle, remote sensing & space technologies

Rohaifa Khaldi | Application of Artificial Intelligence in the study of Ecosystems

Emilio de Leon | Early detection of invasive species using metabarcoding

Joaquín López | LifeBlock and semantic environment status and roadmap

Carlos Javier Navarro | Remote Sensing in ecology and conservation of mountain systems

Nuria Pistón | Ecosystem Services modelling in mountain systems

José Rodriguez Quintero | University of Huelva cross-border projects

Teresa del Rey | Improving connectivity between populations of the endangered Iberian lynx

Antonio José Sáenz Albanés | Tesseract

Antonio José Sáenz Albanés | Technical Presentations Report

Diego de los Santos | Spanish-Portuguese cooperation for the conservation of Iberian biodiversity

Ester Serrão | Biodiversity and Function of underwater habitats



Centro Internacional de Investigacion e Innovacion en Biodiversidad

Oficina Técnica de apoyo a proyectos FEDER LifeWatch ERIC con Junta de Andalucía

Parque Natural Los Alcornocales

Valorizacion de servicios ecosistemicos mediante plataforma AI

Assessing marine biodiversity: MARBEFES project kick-off meeting

Marbefes project

MARBEFES (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services) is the latest of LifeWatch ERIC’s related projects to launch, with the kick-off meeting taking place from 4–6 October in Sopot, Poland. The ambitious Horizon Europe project aims to evaluate and characterise the links between marine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services and the resulting societal goods and benefits in coastal communities. The results will be captured in easy-to-use tools to help practitioners and policy to maximise the ecological value and optimise a sustainable socio-economic use of the marine system for current and future generations.

Representatives from all the MARBEFES project partners gathered in Sopot for a three-day kick-off meeting, involving general presentations of the project goals and expected results, including an overview of all the project Work Packages (WPs). On the first day of the meeting, as part of the general presentation of the project, LifeWatch ERIC CEO Christos Arvanitidis and International Initiatives & Projects Manager Cristina Huertas-Olivares illustrated LifeWatch ERIC’s leading role in in WP5 “Integration & Scenario”. The KOM also involved working group sessions to detail project partners’ involvement and interrelations between WPs to smooth further activities.

You can follow the MARBEFES project on Facebook and Twitter.

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

Semantic Synergies at the OntoPortal Alliance Workshop

OntoPortal Alliance Workshop

At the end of September, members of the team from LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy were in Montpellier, France, for the OntoPortal Alliance Workshop. The OntoPortal Alliance is a consortium of research and infrastructure teams (and one SME) dedicated to promoting semantic and ontology services—in science and more—based on the open, collaboratively developed OntoPortal open-source software. Teams in the Alliance develop and maintain several openly accessible semantic resource repositories. This includes BioPortal, the primary and historical source of OntoPortal code, but also AgroPortal, EcoPortal, MedPortal and MatPortal.

The 2022 OntoPortal Alliance Workshop’s main goal was to consolidate the OntoPortal Alliance organisation and shared agenda. External parties interested in re-using and/or participating to the development of OntoPortal, or more generally interested in the management of ontologies and other types of semantic resources (terminologies, vocabularies, thesauri, etc.) were also welcome at the event, which included an open tutorial on “Setting up your appliance” (for condensed technical information on how to quickly deploy your own ontology repository). 

During the session, the representatives from the anthologies repositories discussed how they plan to use the ontology repositories provided by the alliance. Nicola Fiore, Xeni Kechagioglou (LifeWatch ERIC) and laria Rosati (LifeWatch Italy) presented EcoPortal, the repository of semantic resources developed by LifeWatch ERIC and co-managed with the Italian national node, to brainstorm its next evolution together with the alliance partners. Such synergies are fundamental to ensuring the coordination of the development of semantic resources for scientific research.

In Seville for the EOSC Future Consortium Meeting

eosc future consortium meeting

From 28­–30 September, LifeWatch ERIC hosted a Consortium Meeting of the Horizon2020 project, EOSC Future, at la Casa de la Ciencia, in Seville. At 18 months into the project, the meeting served to review its execution thus far, as well as the next steps to be followed. All the consortium partners were represented, with 71 people attending in person and about 30 online. On the first day, the morning was dedicated to “WP6: Integration of Community Services and Products into EOSC”, which is led by LifeWatch ERIC, and involves the demonstration of EOSC value through Cross-domain Research Science Projects (10 Science Projects are involved in this WP) which will mobilise the research communities for widespread the use of EOSC resources.

Read more about the project’s ambitions:

EOSC Future will build on the existing baseline for the European Open Science Cloud to deliver a platform with a durable set of user-friendly components that are designed for the long haul. It will adopt a system-of-systems approach to the EOSC platform, linking together other research portals, resources and services to respond to the data needs of a wide range of researchers.

One way to think about EOSC is as a fully operational web of data and related services founded on FAIR protocols, principles and standards for accessing interoperable datasets. In practice, EOSC Future will work with key stakeholders to ensure a smooth user experience, developing:

  • EOSC core, the set of enabling services needed to operate the EOSC
  • EOSC exchange registering resources and services from research infrastructures, other EOSC projects and science clusters to the EOSC and integrating them with the EOSC core functionalities
  • the EOSC interoperability framework will provide guidelines for providers that want to integrate services or data into EOSC

EOSC Future will engage with users throughout the different development stages to make sure the EOSC matches researchers’ needs and is intuitive. It will also provide support and training to make sure users can make the most of the EOSC platform.

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