LifeWatch ERIC at TICAL 2025: Sustainable Science and Strategic Alliances

TICAL 2025

LifeWatch ERIC took part in TICAL 2025, the annual conference of the RedCLARA organisation in San José, Costa Rica (November 11–13, 2025), where leaders from digital research infrastructures, academia, and innovation networks from across Latin America and Europe exchange experiences of sustainable collaboration.

Maite Irazábal, Scientific Coordination Support, and Christos Arvanitidis, CEO, contributed with talks and panel discussions to this year’s conference theme “Innovation that Transforms”.

Maite Irazábal presented “FAIR Tools for Assessing the Environmental Impact of Energy Transition Policies”, in the framework of the EU–LAC EnergyTran project. These prototype tools support evidence-based policymaking in the context of the energy transition, by integrating FAIR data and workflow-based analytics from European and Latin American Research Infrastructures (RIs).

The presentation highlighted the importance of data interoperability and open collaboration in addressing sustainability challenges, and the role of infrastructures like LifeWatch ERIC in connecting science with policy.

Christos Arvanitidis offered a broader perspective on the role of RIs in tackling planetary challenges. He highlighted their potential to break barriers and promote innovation and sustainable science. In LifeWatch ERIC, this is made possible thanks to the RI’s multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach, which federates FAIR data, reproducible analytics, and mobilised research communities to accelerate scientific progress and produce synthetic knowledge.

He also presented LifeWatch ERIC’s technological developments such as its Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and Science Knowledge Graphs (SKG), digital ecosystems where researchers can co-develop workflows, access high-performance computing resources, and transform data into actionable insights.

One of the highlights of the conference was the panel on “Research Infrastructures that Transform: Connecting Knowledge and Collaboration between Latin America and Europe,” moderated by Paola Arellano (REUNA Chile). The discussions reiterated the importance of interoperability among research infrastructures and the need for joint work between Latin American and European scientific communities.

Key reflections that emerged from this discussion are that European RIs should open their resources and developments to Latin America to enable collaborative science, and that strengthened EU–LAC international cooperation, political dialogue, mutual understanding, and equitable access to research, could bring better results in science, technology, and innovation.

These interventions reinforced the importance of strategic and sustainable alliances between Europe and Latin America. LifeWatch ERIC and RedCLARA, bound by a Memorandum of Understanding, continue to strengthen cooperation in open science, FAIR data management, and the creation of shared digital tools.

For more information about TICAL, visit https://tical2025.redclara.net/en/programa.

The Crete Declaration published on RIO – Research Ideas and Outcomes Journal

the Crete Declaration illustration

The Crete Declaration (https://www.lifewatch.eu/crete-declaration) is a Declaration of Intent signed on 30 June 2025, on the occasion of the BEeS 2025 Conference, during the “Working Table on Life component of the Biosphere: Complementarities and Synergies”. The event gathered European Research Infrastructures (RIs), projects and organisations with the common goal of exploring shared solutions to today’s global challenges.

Coordinated by LifeWatch ERIC, the signing of the Crete Declaration followed the Working Table’s objective of defining a collaborative roadmap among the parties. Their shared ambition is to advance the One Health approach, a strategy to optimise 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, emerging diseases and many others) are complex and deeply intertwined, and therefore demand a joint effort of complementary strengths.

The policy brief containing the Crete Declaration is now published on the RIO (Research Ideas and Outcomes) journal, as the latest contribution to the LifeWatch ERIC Strategic Working Plan Outcomes open-science collection (https://riojournal.com/topical_collection/243/), a one-stop access point to the most important deliverables by the research infrastructure consortium.

The Declaration focused the signatories’ commitment around four key strategic points:

  • Strengthening the strategic collaboration
  • Advancing data integration and FAIR principles
  • Supporting Open Science Ecosystems
  • Informing Policy and Practice

The parties welcome all European stakeholders committed to One Health to endorse this Declaration and contribute to its implementation.

Read more on EurekAlert, Pensoft and AlphaGalileo.

Underwater marine sounds from the Belgian part of the North Sea: meet SoundLib

SoundLib

The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), has launched SoundLib, its Marine Sound Library collecting underwater sound data from the Belgian part of the North Sea. The open database counts thousands of recordings and advanced analysis tools, and provides new insights into the region’s highly dynamic and complex acoustic environment.

These data could support scientists, policymakers and the public in understanding how natural and human-made sounds affect marine ecosystems and even create new opportunities for AI-driven research. The database also contributed to the Waves of Resonance artistic project in June (https://www.lifewatch.eu/2025/09/25/waves-of-resonance), that explores the psychological impact of climate change and the therapeutic potential of ocean sounds.

Sound in water travels farther, and faster than outside, and for many marine animals it is the primary way to communicate, navigate, and interact with their environment. The European policy context, for this reason, considers it as a critical environmental parameter and includes it among the eleven descriptors for the assessment of Good Environmental Status of marine waters.

Marine sounds include natural sources, such as rainfall, waves, sediment transport and noises originated by the marine fauna, and human sources, such as ship traffic, seismic surveys and offshore energy production.

Learn more about SouldLib on the LifeWatch Belgium website: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/soundlib-marine-sound-library-belgian-part-north-sea

Virtual Research Environments and Essential Variables: LifeWatch ERIC sessions at EGU 2026 open for abstracts submissions

EGU 2026

LifeWatch ERIC is co-organising two interesting sessions during EGU 2026, the European GeoSciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, from 3-8 May 2026. One of the biggest conferences on environmental and earth sciences expects to welcome around 20,000 scientists, presenting their work and learning from and networking with other researchers.

The first session focuses on Virtual Research Environments in Earth and Environmental science, which is at the heart of LifeWatch services and organised in close collaboration with our colleagues in the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), the University of Amsterdam and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. This session aims to bring together case studies and innovative approaches from different domains of the earth sciences, both from a technology point of view, and scientific applications based on workflows, virtual laboratories and even digital twins of (parts of) the environment.

The second session we organise is in collaboration with our ENVRI colleagues and inspired by the work in th the current ENVRI-Hub-Next project where Essential Variables (EVs) play a key role. This session will explore the technical, infrastructural, and policy advancements required to make EVs the foundational language for global environmental cooperation. We welcome contributions addressing scientific use cases, technical barriers, and emerging solutions.

In the links below, you can find more information, or submit an abstract to present your scientific and/or technical use case, work or results in one of the two sessions:
Virtual Research Environments: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU26/session/56636
Essential Variables: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU26/session/57662

Long Live Biodiversity Data! LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy at Living Data 2025

Living Data 2025 (1)

The Living Data 2025 Conference took place in Bogotá, Colombia, from 21-24 October 2025, bringing together biodiversity networks, scientists, researchers, practitioners and other experts from around the world. The event offered an opportunity to connect with the Latin American community and exchange experiences with global biodiversity data initiatives.

This year’s programme focused on three main themes:

  • Building standards that promote data sharing and interoperability;
  • Bringing together and providing access to diverse sources of information;
  • Monitoring our progress toward conserving and restoring the planet’s biodiversity.

LifeWatch ERIC participated actively in the event, co-organising a symposium led by Christos Arvanitidis, CEO, together Niels Raes (NLBIF/Naturalis Biodiversity Centre), Lyubomir Penev, Peter Bozakov, and Nikol Yovcheva (Pensoft Publishers) , titled “Long Live Biodiversity Data: Knowledge Transfer and Continuity across Research Projects”. The session spread over two days, 22 and 23 October (the recording is available here: https://www.livingdata2025.com/program.html?session=6788879-1_2025-10-22_Caldas).

The symposium addressed one of the main challenges in international research projects: their limited duration. The discussion therefore focused on how to ensure that the knowledge and data produced continue to have an impact beyond the projects’ lifetime.

Experts from across DiSSCo, LifeWatch ERIC and Pensoft communities explored strategies for securing the legacy of research results through open science practices, with a particular emphasis on the quality of data for effective reuse, the standardisation of nomenclature, and the development of FAIR foundations for biodiversity genomics. They also discussed the integration of digital tools to enhance collaboration, from platforms for data-rich publication to systems enabling faster communication of invasive species alerts and the translation of local findings into policy-relevant knowledge.

Christos Arvanitidis presented the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, developed within the BiCIKL project, as a concrete example of how European and global communities can work together to ensure lasting access to biodiversity knowledge in his talk, titled “In his talk, titled “Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: Bridging Research Infrastructures, Aggregators, and Communities – Past, Present, and Future”.

Examples from several international initiatives demonstrated how the continuity of biodiversity data can be maintained through information hubs, semantic frameworks, and collaborative workflows that enable exchanges within the global biodiversity data space.

In parallel with the symposium, LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy contributed several oral presentations:

  • Christos Arvanitidis | Transforming Knowledge into Practice: Science, Technology and Innovation in Support of the UN SDGs.
  • Christos Arvanitidis | Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: Bridging Research Infrastructures, Aggregators, and Communities – Past, Present, and Future
  • Maite Irazábal Pla | A FAIR tool for assessing the environmental impact of energy transition policies.
  • Andrea Tarallo | A new platform to build and support citizen science projects in biodiversity.
  • Andrea Tarallo | LifeWatch Italy infrastructure: a national asset for Open and FAIR Biodiversity Data.
  • Martina Pulieri | Bridging biodiversity data: an ontology-driven approach
  • Ilaria Rosati | Traits Thesaurus: a semantic artefact to harmonise data and metadata of aquatic organism traits
  • Cristina Di Muri | A FAIR and Open approach for the study and integrated management of Invasive Alien Species in Italy
  • Cristina Di Muri | Empowering data integration and semantic interoperability across environmental domains to address the biodiversity crisis and related environmental challenges.

Overall, it was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with project partners, exchange ideas with institutions from our field, and meet colleagues from our national node, LifeWatch Italy. Take a look at the conference website for updates, recordings, photos and more: www.livingdata2025.com

In the picture: Christos Arvanitidis, Maite Irazábal Pla (LifeWatch ERIC), Ilaria Rosati, Andrea Tarallo, Cristina Di Muri (LifeWatch Italy).

OntoPortal Workshop 2025

OntoPortal Workshop

The OntoPortal Workshop 2025, hosted by Freie Universität Berlin at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, took place in Berlin from 29 September to 2 October.

Every year, the Workshop brings together members of the OntoPortal Alliance to discuss strategies and future activities. The OntoPortal Alliance is in fact a consortium of several research and infrastructure teams dedicated to promoting the development of ontology repositories, in science and other disciplines, based on the open, collaboratively developed OntoPortal open source software (Source: Clement Jonquet, Jennifer L Vendetti, Guillaume Alviset, Ilaria Rosati, John Graybeal, et al.. OntoPortal Workshop 2024 Report. INRAE; Stanford University. 2024. ffhal-04891214f).

These teams develop and maintain several openly accessible semantic artefact catalogues, or ontology repositories, in multiple domains. Among them, LifeWatch ERIC manages EcoPortal, the repository of semantic resources for ecology and related fields (https://ecoportal.lifewatch.eu).

This year, representatives from EcoPortal (Ilaria Rosati, Martina Pulieri and Michael Griniezakis), AgroPortal (Clement Jonquet, Imad Bourouche), EarthPortal (Christelle Pierkot and Hakim Allem), BiodivPortal (Naouel Karam, Ralph Schäfermeier and Adrian Paschke), BioPortal (Mark Musen, Jennifer Vendetti, Michael Dorf and Alex Skrenchuk), MatPortal (Alexandru-Aurelian Todor), OntoPortal-Astro (Baptiste Cecconi), CHPortal (Beatrice Markhoff, Louise Parkin), SocioPortal (Darren Bell), HSPortal (Anais Guillem) and other guests from NFDI (Roman Baum and Jakob Voss) joined the discussions.

Key topics included ontology development lifecycle, MOD-API implementation, new developments including generative AI and OntoPortal, and collaborations in projects and initiatives.

ENERGYTRAN: highlights from the international e-learning course on Open Science and Environmental Challenges

Guillermo Anlló opens the ENERGYTRAN Open Science and Environmental Challenges e-course

From 22 to 26 September 2025, the EULAC ENERGYTRAN project delivered the e-learning Course “Environmental Challenges and Open Science – an approach to Innovation and Technology” in San José, Costa Rica.

Organised in a hybrid format, with in-person sessions hosted at the Centro Nacional de Alta Tecnología (CeNAT) and streamed online, the event brought together a wide range of countries and institutions from across Latin America and Europe.

The course was designed to train professionals in the principles and practices of Open Science, and potential applications to tackle global issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. Experts from EU-LAC shared knowledge, tools and case studies demonstrating how Open Science fosters collaboration, accelerates discovery, and strengthens inclusive participation to research.

The programme combined both international and regional perspectives. Guillermo Anlló from UNESCO opened the presentations with a reflection on the role of Open Science, and the urgent need for a cultural shift. Giulia Malaguarnera (University of Minho/OpenAIRE, Portugal) showed how Open Science has become institutionalised in Europe, supported by infrastructures like OpenAIRE and EOSC, highlighting ongoing debates on research assessment. Andrea Mora Campos (Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica) offered the Latin America’s perspective through the description of its community-driven model, built on non-commercial open access and strong networks like La Referencia and SciELO.

The second day featured a session on open software by Kevin Moraga García (Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica), with contributions from Diana Andone (UPT Timisoara, România) and Ricardo Andrade, Alexandre Lucas, and Carlos Silva (INESCTEC, Portugal), who showcased open tools, repositories, and practical applications.

The focus of the third shifted to infrastructures and capacity building. Tania Altamirano (RedCLARA) presented digital ecosystems in Latin America, Allan Campos (CeNAT, Costa Rica) highlighted the benefits of Open Science for early-career researchers, and Radu Vasiu (UPT Timisoara) examined publication impact and quality methods.

The fourth day explored the application of Open Science to biodiversity and environmental sciences, with Francisco Pando (GBIF, Spain) and Julio Paneque (LifeWatch ERIC, Spain) presenting FAIR data and a range of biodiversity-related tools.

Finally, the closing day turned to social participation and citizen science. Rafael Corrales (UNESCO, Costa Rica) emphasised the integration of scientific, local, and Indigenous knowledge, while Valeria Arza (UNSAM, Argentina) shared experiences of citizen science initiatives from the region.

This course, one of the deliverables of the ENERGYTRAN project, was the result of a joint effort between CeNAT, OEI, INESCTEC, IPS, and LifeWatch ERIC to promote a model of science that is more collaborative, transparent, and accessible to all.

Agroecology & Digital Innovation: LifeWatch ERIC at ERSAC 2025

ERSAC 2025

The ERSAC Conference 2025 (European Research Services on Agroecology), from 1 to 3 October 2025, brought together scientists, decision-makers and practitioners across Europe to exchange strategies for a sustainable and resilient agriculture sector and advance actions in support of the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy.

LifeWatch ERIC joined the conference under the framework of the AgroServ Project (https://www.lifewatch.eu/agroserv): a network of research infrastructures that offer integrated services, with the objective of accelerating the agroecological transition. LifeWatch ERIC contributes through its infrastructure, data services and coordination in order to strengthen the collaboration across infrastructures.

Iria Soto Embodas (Scientific Researchers at LifeWatch ERIC’s ICT Core, presented a talk on “Data and Monitoring for the Agroecological Transition in the Agroecology Partnership.”, in the session dedicated to Agroecological Transition for Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture. Iria emphasised the need for harmonised data collection and monitoring standards in Europe, and the role of ICT and digital platforms in evaluating, supporting, and scaling agroecological practices. In fact, associating agroecological policy and practice with robust monitoring and data systems can support sustainable farming at scale.

Are you curious to learn more about agroecology? We had a conversation on this topic with José Manuel Ávila-Castuera, Senior Scientific Manager. Listen to the podcast to learn more about this approach: https://www.lifewatch.eu/podcasts/agroecology-applying-ecological-processes-to-agriculture.

Highlights: ‘Marine SABRES in Fairs’ at the EU Researchers’ Night 2025

Marine SABRES in Fairs - ERN 2025

For one night, research and discovery took centre stage in Lecce at the European Researchers’ Night – ERN Apulia Med 2025. LifeWatch ERIC welcomed more than 80 visitors at its ‘Marine SABRES in Fairs’ stand, offering an immersive journey into marine biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, and the future of the blue economy.

Children, families, students, and curious citizens explored the results of Marine SABRES, a Horizon Europe project that is working across Europe to restore marine ecosystems and ensure sustainable use of ocean resources. Posters, brochures, videos and hands-on materials guided the audience through the project’s work and its mission to make ecosystem-based management more practical and achievable.

One of the highlights of the night was the preview of the Marine SABRES Serious Game. For the first time, young visitors could try out the interactive online game, ahead of the official School Competition scheduled for World Fisheries Day, 21 November 2025. The game is designed for students between 10 and 18 years old and helps them discover how human activities affect marine ecosystems, and why this matters for our own well-being.

The stand also featured the documentary trailers produced by the LifeWatch Italy Multimedia Production Centre, offering a glimpse into the project’s three marine regions: the Arctic Northeast Atlantic, the Tuscan Archipelago and Macaronesia. Additional filming is planned during the next Marine SABRES General Assembly in Pisa (21–23 October 2025).


See the full photo gallery to revisit the key moments of the event.

If you missed the event, you can still watch the documentary trailers on LifeWatching.tv and discover the Serious Game School Competition.

For more information, please visit Marine SABRES official website: www.marinesabres.eu

The psychological impact of marine sounds: meet Waves of Resonance

Waves of Resonance

In June 2025, the European Marine Board launched the sound project “Waves of Resonance”, with the artist Elise Guillaume and her scientific collaborators: Clea Parcerisas (LifeWatch Belgium) and Marine Severin (VLIZ). The Belgian artist works on the interactions between psychology, ecology and notions of care. With Waves of Resonance she explores the psychological impact of climate change and the therapeutic potential of ocean sounds.

The project started during the EMBracing the Ocean artist-in-residence programme under the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development: a unique idea combining a wide range of different sounds, such as singing whales and cracking sea ice, fish and crustaceans, human activities like ship engines and pile-driving, dolphins, seabirds and many others. It also includes sounds normally inaudible to the human ear, with the results of having multi-layered sound installations that aim to strengthen emotional connection to the ocean.

LifeWatch Belgium has played a key role in the project, providing the underwater sound data from its observatory in the Belgian part of the North Sea.

Waves of Resonance also addresses the critical issue of sound pollution and aims to inspire pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Throughout the project, Elise also documented the coastal landscape and the scientific recording processes, developing her photographs with seaweed as a low-toxicity alternative.

Find out more on this project: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/waves-resonance-artistic-journey-lifewatch-belgiums-ocean-data

Picture: Acoustic equipment being retrieved with VLIZ acoustic team, North Sea, 2024 © John Janssens & Elise Guillaume