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.

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.