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.

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

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.


Biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems using genetic methods

Hand holding vial containing clear liquid

The second part of a DNAqua-Net workshop on “Biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems using genetic methods”, was hosted virtually by the Cyprus University of Technology and the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture (IMBBC) of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research on Friday 12 March 2021. It presented to experts, and to the general public, the exciting potential of new, promising and rapidly developing genetic methods for assessing biodiversity, and their use as monitoring tools.

Throughout their lifetime, all organisms release DNA into the environment (environmental DNA or eDNA). New genetic methods, such as DNA metabarcoding, detect this eDNA that is released into the environment and can partially identify and quantify the existence of various organisms without necessarily collecting whole organisms. In aquatic ecosystems, for example, living species can be detected by filtering only a few litres of water and submitting them to genetic analysis.

In an age of great ecological challenges, eDNA methods will find applications in monitoring changes in biodiversity caused by factors such as ecosystem degradation and climate change, in the early detection of alien/invasive species, and in the identification of rare and endangered species. They therefore have the potential to substantially improve the procedures for assessing and monitoring the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems, in particular as part of national and European directives, such as the Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

The workshop provided in-depth information on the great potential of DNA and eDNA-based methods to experts involved in the practical implementation of these European Directives, and highlighted the status quo of the reference databases. The presentations by IMBBC and CUT were followed by a discussion which emphasised the need for collaborative action between stakeholders (scientists in the fields of genetics, ecology and bioinformatics, policy makers, management bodies, NGOs, etc.) in order to standardise the methods used at national level so as to be able to engage in formal bio-monitoring actions on the ecological quality of aquatic ecosystems right across Europe.

Spatial modelling in Portugal

Spatial Modelling

study from 2012 to 2019 in the Sabor river in northeast Portugal focused on stream fish affected by hydropower development. Trajectory analysis was used to quantify the directionality and velocity of community change across 30 sites, and geometric modelling provided a simple framework to understand where and why temporal community dynamics vary across dendritic stream networks.

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LifeWatch ERIC Presentation at University of Cyprus

LifeWatch ERIC Chief Executive Officer, Christos Arvanitidis, gave an online presentation to the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Cyprus on 3 March 2021. The Zoom session was recorded and provides a convenient overview of LifeWatch ERIC’s mission, recent developments and what it offers to the scientific community studying the impacts of climate change in biodiversity and ecosystem research.

Dr Arvanitidis, who previously worked at Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, explained that research infrastructures do not do the research themselves, they supply the means for others to pursue their research. LifeWatch ERIC is a European consortium that provides e-Science research facilities so that we can all arrive at a deeper understanding of biodiversity organisation and ecosystem functions and services. In particular, the infrastructure allows access to:

  • Open Data, also known as FAIR-compliant data, through innovative technologies;
  • Reproducible analytics, so that workflows can be verified; and
  • Mobilised communities, helping scientists to work across disciplines around the globe.


The seminar was introduced by Dr Vasilis Promponas, Head of the Bioinformatics Research Laboratory at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Cyprus, whose research interests include large scale comparative genomics, a field that stands to benefit from the tools and service available through the LifeWatch ERIC portal. The University of Cyprus is a public research university established in Nicosia in 1989, which offers a range of courses to over 7000 students.

Please click here to access the CEO’s presentation.

Life in the North Sea is becoming more exotic

VLIZ Alien Species Consortium

A recent study of 14 national and international institutions – the “VLIZ Alien Species Consortium” – revealed the presence of 79 exotic (alien) marine and brackish species in the Belgian part of the North Sea and the Scheldt estuary. This translates to a 15% increase in alien species in these areas over the past decade (2012-2020). An increase in intercontinental shipping, a better monitoring of these species, and movement of species for aquaculture purposes are all likely explanations.

The VLIZ Alien Species Consortium compiled their findings in a book, and factsheets for all 79 exotic species are available through their website (both book and website are only available in Dutch).

The taxonomic information and alien distributions of these 79 Belgian alien species are also available through the Belgian Register of Marine Species (BeRMS) and the World Register of Introduced Marine Species (WRiMS), both sub-registers of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). WoRMS, WRiMS and BeRMS are all contributors to the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone.

By compiling taxonomic information, native and alien distributions, and other relevant information (such as e.g. invasiveness, impact, pathways of introduction), the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone offers scientists and policy makers the needed information to analyze the current situation and to work towards possible prevention measures to stop further introductions and spreading of these species. All of this – linked to the currently maintained ‘Watch-list’ that keeps track of potential new introductions in the area – can lead to the set-up of a fast detection system and the development of a control and management framework.

See the Complete Species List here.