LifeWatch ERIC in DOORS Project Kick-Off Meeting

DOORS Project

LifeWatch ERIC was proud to represent part of the pan-European contingent of 37 partners in the kick-off meeting for the new EU project ‘DOORS’, led by GeoEcoMar, on 29–30 June 2021. The meeting was launched by Wendy Bonne of the European Commission and Mr Ciprian Teleman, Romanian Minister of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation, who said:

“DOORS represents a clear commitment of the European Union for the Black Sea, which will enable a climate neutral, sustainable and productive blue economy. Education, Research and innovation is the Golden Triangle for the knowledge-based economy to strengthen the links between Romanian and European scientists.”

But what is DOORS?

DOORS is a €9m Horizon 2020 project* that stands for ‘Developing Optimal and Open Research Support’ in the Black Sea, which is infamously the world’s most polluted. It will link science, policy and industry for critical Black Sea regeneration, bringing together expertise and technology from institutions from the Black Sea region and other European countries to address the human and climate change impacts on damaged ecosystems.

What exactly will it do?

DOORS will develop a common framework of scientific methods for gathering data, allowing partners to better understand the complex marine processes that happen across the Black Sea. The project will provide a system that will bring together information from in-situ measurements, research cruises, satellite observation, modelling and data integration capabilities.
Alongside the integration of scientific knowledge sharing, it is a fundamental objective for DOORS to engage with wider society. By providing mechanisms for business to link with research, DOORS will create new job opportunities for emerging Blue Growth economies through new synergies and mentoring schemes; the first of its kind to be setup in the Black Sea. Key initiatives that engage schools, universities and general citizens of the region will promote behaviour change and celebrate best practice, influencing future policy, Blue Growth and the health of Black Sea communities.

What role will LifeWatch ERIC play?

LifeWatch ERIC will be participating in Work Package 2: Harmonisation; 6: Blue Growth; 7: Capacity Building; 8: Stakeholder Engagement; and 9: Dissemination and Communication. Alberto Basset, Service Centre Director and project coordinator for LifeWatch ERIC, noted: 

“LifeWatch ERIC’s strong ties with the biodiversity and ecosystem research communities, along with its specialist knowledge in data integration and providing training activities will ensure the infrastructure’s contribution to all three of the DOORS project’s core pillars: System of Systems, Blue Growth Accelerator and Knowledge Transfer and Training. We look forward to strengthening and establishing connections in the Black Sea research community through DOORS, confident that the results of this project will be advantageous for both citizens and scientists of the Black Sea area, as well as Europe as a whole.”

Click here for the DOORS website. You can also follow its activities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

*grant agreement No. 101000518

LifeWatch ERIC at the 1st International Congress of Equinology and Equestrian Tourism

e-Horse: International Congress of Equinology and Equestrian Tourism

Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, CTO, represented LifeWatch ERIC yesterday at the 1st International Congress of Equinology and Equestrian Tourism. The interdisciplinary event took place at the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo on the northern Portuguese coast. It was held in the Professor Lima de Carvalho Auditorium and co-organised by Dr Enrique Alonso-García, one of the founders of LifeWatch ERIC, who gave a presentation entitled “The International ‘Wild/feral horses in National Parks’ initiative: the case of the Iberian Peninsula”.

The aim of the Congress was to investigate a range of research themes based on the scientific studies of equines, as research on equine social behaviour and cognition is still scarce, despite horses having traditionally been the most-researched animals in Europe due to their major role in the dynamics of human societies. In fact, the event was split between both social and scientific aspects of equine research, which the project behind the event maintains requires the creation of an independent and holistic scientific discipline.

Dr González-Aranda gave a scientific intervention as part of the panel “Language, Intelligence and Cognition”, with his presentation: “e-Horse: the EU LifeWatch ERIC initiative on digital transformation and the role of equids in biodiversity conservation and sustainable use” (e-Horse: a iniciativa EU LifeWatch ERIC sobre transformação digital e o papel dos equídeos na conservação da biodiversidade e uso sustentável).  

The e-Horse Initiative

e-Horse is the LifeWatch ERIC initiative on digital transformation to understand the role of equids in biodiversity conservation and sustainability. As a distributed e-Infrastructure, LifeWatch ERIC provides state-of-art ICT in the form of outstanding analysis techniques such as Geodesign to support decision and policy makers in addressing societal challenges. It takes a transdisciplinary scientific evidence-based knowledge approach, applied in key sectors such as Agroecology, Invasive Alien Species impacts, and more. The work LifeWatch ERIC does in integrating micro-, meso- and macro- scales (which presents a challenge in terms of data heterogeneity) contributes towards the accomplishment of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 & the Green Deal, as well as the SDG 2030 objectives. 

The e-Horse initiative involves other world regions besides Europe, among which Latin-America and the Caribbean, the USA, Africa, Japan, etc. It is therefore seen as an international referent in the holistic approach to horse livestock and ecosystem sustainable management. Together with the provision of advance services dealing with topics such as genetics, ethology, cultural heritage, etc., it fosters sustainable socioeconomic development beyond preservation activities. So far, two areas of e-Horse activity are of note: (a) Feasibility study of grassland monitoring for wild and domestic horse habitat mapping, making use of the EU-Copernicus programme for operational monitoring applications based on high resolution and acquisition frequency of Sentinel-1 (radar) and Sentinel-2 (optical) satellites, and (b) Development of equestrian sustainable ecotourism activities in the Portugal-Spain transboundary ecosystems corridor through cultural heritage trails.

Overall, e-Horse supports the provision of proper ecosystem sustainable services by demonstrating the essential role that horses play in recovering ecosystems worldwide. A concrete example of this is the case of mitigating the “drying of the oaks” disease in the “dehesas-montados”, with e-Horse linking cultural and biodiversity policies in instances of private sector involvement, through the development of citizen science activities.

Keeping up with LifeWatch Belgium

Keeping up with LifeWatch Belgium: a hand displaying Wormsina specimens, a still from a MarineRegions map, and the cover of the UN's World Oceans Assessment.

LifeWatch Belgium has been busy over the last few months, so enjoy a round-up of some of their best stories. You can read more news from LifeWatch Belgium, including the full versions of these featured articles, on their website. Source images: Alice Schumacher (Natural History Museum Vienna), MarineRegions.org & UN.org.

 

WoRMS honoured with new genus

The World Register of Marine Species, better known as WoRMS, is hosted by VLIZ, which is a member of LifeWatch Belgium. For the first time, in recognition of the platform’s contribution to taxonomy research, a genus has been named after the Register: Wormsina. Harzhauser & Landau established the genus for a Miocene Paratethyan Mitridae, noting: “We all are frequently using and consulting WoRMS and this is [our] contribution to make this important platform even more visible.”
The full paper is available on ZooTaxa & ZooBank. Be sure to check out the Wormsina monograph on page 49! You can view the genus on WoRMS and MolluscaBase. Click here for the original article.

 

MarineRegions’ Exclusive Economic Zones featured on MarineTraffic.com

An important dataset from MarineRegions, (funded partly by LifeWatch Belgium) has now been featured as a map on MarineTraffic.com, helping to improve the experience of millions of users. Since 31 March 2021, vessel locations can be plotted against the global Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), a dataset provided by MarineRegions. EEZ was originally published in 2006 and shows the ocean and seas belonging to coastal states. The EEZ dataset and its derived products are increasingly being adopted by a wide range of users, from industry over researchers to journalists.
Read the full article here.    

 

VLIZ research data infrastructures played key role in UN Ocean report

On 21 April 2021, the United Nations launched the Second World Ocean Assessment (WOA II) on the state of the ocean, covering environmental, economic and social aspects. Staff from the data centre of VLIZ, a member of LifeWatch Belgium, were among the 300 selected from a pool of 780 experts around the world who contributed to this landmark document. The first cycle (WOA I) focused on establishing baselines, whereas WOA II, which ran from 2016 until 2020, extended the scope to evaluating trends and identifying gaps.
The contributions of VLIZ to WOA II were made possible through the support received from the Research Foundation – Flanders as part of the Belgian contribution to LifeWatch. Click here to learn more about the details of these contributions.

EOSC Future: Call for Evaluators

EOSC Future

LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be a partner in the EOSC Future project, which, over the next two and a half years, will develop an environment with professional data services, open research products and infrastructure. It looks to create a so-called ‘system of systems’ that will support European researchers in managing the entire data lifecycle: from sharing, managing and exploiting their own data to discovering, re-using and recombining the datasets of others. The project will engage, train and support (potential) EOSC users and will encourage providers to sign up by offering easy onboarding, ticket management and analytics.

Since its official kick-off meeting on 10 June, the project has launched a call for external evaluators, seeking experts to evaluate a series of diverse grants to be awarded by the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Though the call will remain open for submissions until June 2023,  experts will be called on to evaluate grant applications as soon as October 2021.

To enable the co-creation of EOSC, via early adoption, technical and domain solution development and interoperability, RDA will be running a rich set of regular open calls. The RDA Open Calls mechanism is backed by a €1 000 000 grant earmarked for engaging with multiple stakeholders, including targeted scientific communities, technical experts and early career researchers. The calls will be complemented by a broad range of support activities, such as events, use cases, info packages, best practices, a Scientific Ambassador Network and dedicated RDA groups. These activities will enable a continual innovation workflow and engagement with science projects to support the implementation of an EOSC environment.  

In keeping with its principles of transparent and community-driven action, RDA is looking for external expert evaluators to support the decision-making process for awarding the RDA Open Calls grants. These evaluators will operate remotely via the EOSC Future Grants Platform and will be responsible for evaluating applications for RDA Open Calls, both for general and discipline- or domain-specific grants. While the call for external expert evaluators is open for the entire duration of the EOSC Future project, evaluators will be needed as soon as October 2021. Evaluators will be routinely selected from the pool of applicants based on their availability and the expertise required. Aside from a few exceptional cases, drafting an individual evaluation report will be compensated with a €150 fee (equivalent to 0.3 working days). 

Experts can submit their applications via the dedicated EOSC Future Grants Platform, which will manage the grants application process for all calls under EOSC Future‘s €1.6 million grant fund. This includes the €1 000 000 in grants under the RDA Open Calls as well as another €600 000 awarded through various DIH Calls.

The AERAP Science Summit

LifeWatch ERIC at AERAP

What a week! LifeWatch ERIC staff members participated in a total of 14 sessions across the Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Summit, hosted virtually by AERAP Science on 14-18 June 2021. 37 hours of presentations and discussions, all focused on improving knowledge transfer on science and innovation between Africa and Europe. This Summit drew on a range of processes, including AGENDA 2063, Africa’s blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse; the AU Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024); and the European Commission Communication Towards a Comprehensive Strategy with Africa which foresees future cooperation built on five partnerships: green transition, digital transformation, growth and jobs, peace and governance and migration and mobility. 

LifeWatch ERIC took part in sessions covering a range of topics, from Blockchain, to agri-food systems, to the Global Biodiversity Framework, featuring participation from CEO Christos Arvanitidis, CTO and ICT-Core Director Juan Miguel González-Aranda, CFO Lucas de Moncuit and Service Centre Director Alberto Basset, along with staff members from the ICT Core and the Service Centre: Elisa Morón-López, Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés, José Manuel Ávila, Javier López-Torres and Cosimo Vallo.

LifeWatch ERIC staff participated in 14 panels overall, alongside esteemed representatives from Europe and Africa, such as Tanya Abrahamse, CEO of GBIF; Intisar Soghayroun, Minister of High Education and Scientific Research of Sudan; Maria Cristina Russo, Director for International Cooperation in Research & Innovation at the European Comission; Clint García Alimandri of the Junta de Andalucia; Maxwell Otim, Director at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Uganda; and many more. The Summit saw a large amount of support from LifeWatch ERIC, which also convened the discussion “Cooperation on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services” alongside the South African Department of Science and Innovation. LifeWatch ERIC also participated in the last AERAP conference in September 2020.

You can view LifeWatch ERIC’s presentations below:

Elisa Morón-López, Lucas de Moncuit – Overview of European Science Programmes and Policies

Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Opening Plenary

Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Africa-Europe Geoscience Cooperation to Sustain our Planet

José Manuel Ávila – Developing a Skills Agenda that Works for Future Generations in Africa. Download PDF

Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés – Our Digital Future for our Citizens

Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Science Capacity Building in Africa

Christos Arvanitidis, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Alberto Basset – Cooperation on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services

José Manuel Ávila – Africa-Europe Research Cooperation for the Advancement of Agri-Food Systems. Download PDF

Christos Arvanitidis: Oceans of Cooperation

Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés, Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Building ICT Capacity

Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Science at the United Nations’ 76th  General Assembly, September 2021: How Science Advances the SDGs

Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés – Blockchain in Africa

Javier López-Torres, Cosimo Vallo: Youth Challenge: Inspiring the Next Generation with the Schools Satellite Project. Download PDF

Christos Arvanitidis, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Alberto Basset – Africa-Europe Cooperation on the Global Biodiversity Framework

Christos Arvanitidis, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, José Manuel Ávila (Download PDF) – Africa-Europe Partnering Together for Future Biodiversity Challenges: Consortia Building

The 2021 ENVRI Community International School

The official banner for the ENVRI Community International School - Services for FAIRness

The 2021 edition of the ENVRI Community International School has been launched!

Organised by ENVRI-FAIR and LifeWatch ERIC, the ENVRI Community International School is at its fourth edition, having established itself as an unmissable opportunity to learn about FAIRness in the framework of Research Infrastructures. Having gone into depth on data FAIRness and data management during previous editions, this year the School will focus on Services for FAIRness, from their design to their development and publication.

Further information on the programme and teachers will soon be available.

SAVE THE DATE | The school will take place online from 27 September – 8 October 2021.

Do you want to know more about the School? Check out the previous editions at the following links:

The 2020 Winter School on DATA FAIRness

The 2019 Summer School on DATA FAIRness

LifeWatch ERIC at the RI-VIS Latin America-Europe Symposium

RI-VIS Latin America Symposium

LifeWatch ERIC was delighted to take part in the RI-VIS Latin America-Europe Symposium on Research Infrastructures, held online 15-17 June 2021. The European Union and Latin America enjoy privileged relations and are natural partners, linked by strong historical, cultural and economic ties. The EU-LAC ResInfra project (Towards a new EU-LAC partnership in Research Infrastructures, funded under Horizon 2020), of which LifeWatch ERIC is a partner, has for ten years been building biregional collaboration on climate change, digital innovation, research and education. Cooperation between the 27 EU and 33 LAC (Latin American and Caribbean) countries, which together comprise over one billion people, is an important part of addressing major global issues like infectious disease, food security, and natural disasters.

The RI-VIS Latin America-Europe Symposium on Research Infrastructures brought together nearly 200 speakers to consolidate collaboration on enabling scientists to use specific facilities, resources, and expertise to accelerate scientific achievements, overcome boundaries, train highly skilled specialists, and promote sustainable research. The goal was to deliver a sustainability plan and roadmap which included human capital development and capacity building within its science, technology and innovation framework.

LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer and ICT-Core Director, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda, delivered an enthusiastic presentation on the “LifEuLAC Pilot Case Study” on Tuesday 15 June, as part of the session Case studies of multinational and biregional Latin American-European partnerships. He outlined LifeWatch ERIC’s role in economic evaluations of ecosystems, describing how through strategic, tactical and operational plans it will continue to expand environmental studies that contribute to economic growth and equity.

The development of innovative ICT tools – Blockchain, which illustrates the socioeconomic value of ecosystem services, and Tesseract, which is designed to support policymaker decision-making – places LifeWatch ERIC in a strong position to measure the impact of global climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem research. Ongoing collaboration with other Research Infrastructures will produce greater data evidence and understanding that will greatly benefit both regions of the partnership.

For more information, click here to read the White Paper published ahead of the Symposium, entitled “Recommendations towards cooperation between Latin American and European research infrastructures”.

ENVRI Community – Studying the environment today to tackle the challenges of tomorrow

A screenshot from the ENVRI Community video, showing planet Earth in Space

LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be a member of ENVRI: a community of environmental research infrastructures working together to observe the Earth as one system. We strive to provide open and FAIR environmental data, tools and other services for anyone to use for free.

Planet Earth is an interconnected system. Biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere – all these parts of the Earth interact together.

Planet Earth is an interconnected system. Biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere – all these parts of the Earth interact together.


Researchers grab chance to experiment with LifeWatch ERIC tools at Hands-on Session

Screenshot of Hands-on Session featuring smiling participants

On Friday 4 June 2021, as a follow-up to the successful e-Science for NIS Research Workshop on 20-21 May, LifeWatch ERIC gave researchers the opportunity to try out LifeWatch ERIC-developed software at a Hands-on Session. It marked the debut of key tools built by LifeWatch ERIC as part of its Internal Joint Initiative (IJI) in its quest to facilitate open access data in the domains of biodiversity and ecosystem research.

All training resources, including presentations, demos and manuals are available through the LifeWatch ERIC Training Platform. (Please note, those who missed out on the Session can find the relevant materials simply by following the link to the training programme and creating an account).

After an introduction from CTO and ICT-Core Director Juan Miguel González-Aranda, together with Service Director Alberto Basset, the floor was given to technical staff, Lucia Vaira, Xeni Kechagioglou, Antoni Huguet Vives, Nikos Miandakis and Antonio José Saénz Albanés, to explain and demonstrate the Metadata Catalogue and the Tesseract VRE, which was illustrated using the Crustaceans Workflow (presented at the Workshop on 20 May). After the presentations and demonstrations, participants were given the opportunity to try the services and workflows for themselves, interacting with the trainers who provided guidance and feedback.

The session was brought to a close with input from Juan Miguel González-Aranda, who reiterated the importance of continued feedback and exchange with the scientific community in order for LifeWatch ERIC to refine and improve its services. CEO Christos Arvanitidis then thanked everyone who took part, noting that the Session was just the beginning of the results LifeWatch ERIC has to showcase after its first five years of hard work alongside dedicated collaborators. He also highlighted that LifeWatch ERIC is leading an important Work Package as part of the EOSC Future project, and how the efforts of everyone involved will ensure that LifeWatch ERIC services can be deployed on the EOSC platform, benefiting a wider audience than ever before.

LifeWatch ERIC in BiCIKL Kick-Off Meeting

BiCiKL

The kick-off meeting for the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) took place last week on 27-28 May! LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be one of the fourteen official partners of this Horizon 2020 project,* contributing to the establishment of open science practices in the biodiversity domain as it follows its own mission to become a worldwide provider of content and services for this research community.

But what is BiCIKL?

BiCIKL is an EU-funded project coordinated by Pensoft that aims to unite key European and international research infrastructures across ten countries in their quest to facilitate open science and fair data practices in the biodiversity scientific community. Its four key products have been identified as: a community equipped with tools for searching and accessing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) interlinked data; an interlinked corpora of knowledge for biodiversity and related research domains; automated tools and workflows for data liberation and FAIRisation from literature; and semantic-based journal production workflows for publication and reuse of FAIR biodiversity data.

What exactly does it do?

BiCIKL plans to build a Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, providing access to data, associated tools and services at each stage and along the entire research cycle. Speaking technically, it will focus on harvesting, liberating, linking and reusing subarticle level data literature (specimens, material citations, samples, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables, etc.), whether PDF- or XML-based. It will provide seamless linking and usage tracking of data along the line: specimens → sequences → species → analytics → publications → biodiversity knowledge graph → re-use.

What role does LifeWatch ERIC play?

LifeWatch ERIC, which already carries out specialised work in the areas of semantics and usage tracking, will be key in helping BiCIKL develop the methods, tools and workflows required for the realisation of BiCIKL goals. Its two main tasks will be to analyse the technical requirement of users and implement the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BiKH). It will participate in testing and streamlining interoperability and the alignment of findability, reuse and accessibility. Furthermore, LifeWatch ERIC will contribute to defining and implementing the necessary operational framework, as well as identifying BiKH components and translating the functional diagramme and operational framework into an educational cloud.


BiCIKL’s website is currently under construction, but you can follow its activities on Twitter.


*grant agreement No. 101007492, duration May 2021-2024