Department: Working Group Coordinators

Alberto Basset is Director of LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre, Member of its Executive Board and full professor of ecology at the University of Salento (Italy). His main research interests are on biodiversity organization and maintenance, ecosystem functioning and services and their responses to natural and anthropic pressures, including climate changes. The research activities have produced more than 200 publications on international peer reviewed journals, being quoted in 2014 as one of the 20 top scientists for the scientific production on ecosystem ecology. He has been president of the Italian Ecological Society, of the Ecological European Federation and of LaguNet, being founding member and current president of the Euro-Mediterranean Federation of the Lagoon Research Networks (EUROMEDLAG). Alberto Basset is currently member of both General Assembly and Executive Board of the ‘eScience European Infrastructure on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch ERIC)’ and of the Advisory Committee of the European Research Infrastructure on ‘Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory (EMSO ERIC)’ and he is the University of Salento responsible in the National Node of the European Research Infrastructure on Long Term Ecological Research (eLTER RI). Alberto Basset is delegate of the Ministry of University and Research in the European Partnership ‘Biodiversa+’ and he has been a member of the Italian delegation to the recent G20 meeting on challenges and opportunities for research and innovation in the Amazon and Tropical Forests.

Prof. Ismael Navas Delgado is a Computer Engineer and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Málaga, with additional training in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MSc). His research career bridges Computer Science and Life Sciences through the use of semantic technologies for data integration and analysis. He has made significant contributions in areas such as biomedical data modelling, workflow management for scientific data analysis, and the development of FAIR-compliant data infrastructures. Prof. Navas has authored over 100 scientific contributions, with a strong presence in international journals and conferences. A substantial portion (76%) of his publications appear in top-quartile journals (CiteScore), and nearly a third (30.8%) involve international collaboration. His work has helped structure and harmonise complex data for diverse fields, including systems biology, biodiversity, and healthcare, leading to measurable improvements in data interoperability and reuse. He has played a central role in the development of the TITAN platform, a knowledge- based system for workflow management that is currently being transferred to practice through collaborative projects with hospitals and environmental research infrastructures. As co-PI of several national research projects (e.g. TIN2014-58304-R, TIN2017-86049-R, PID2020-112540RB-C41), he has helped define research directions at the intersection of semantic integration and applied analytics. He currently contributes to European soil biodiversity initiatives as WG Leader in the COST Action EUDaphobase.

Virginia Garcia Millan is an environmental scientist specialised in remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and regional-scale ecosystem analysis. Her scientific work focuses on environmental protection and conservation. She considers remote sensing as a tool to obtain a quick and comprehensive overview of environmental status and dynamics. She has conducted research in Canada (Earth Observation Science Lab—EOSL, University of Alberta), Germany (EFTAS Fernerkundung GmbH), and Sweden (Lund University). Previously, she worked at the European Topic Centre (affiliated to the University of Málaga) on assignments for the European Environment Agency (EEA). Her career began with the evaluation of various environmental monitoring sensors—such as hyperspectral sensors on multi-angle platforms for mapping dry tropical forest succession in Latin America, or drones equipped with multispectral cameras and LiDAR for characterising boreal forests in Canada and Scandinavia. Currently, she focuses her research on the big data analysis of satellite imagery using artificial intelligence to map Mediterranean forests, evaluate European forest restoration, monitor terrestrial ecosystem carbon sequestration, and generate early indicators of environmental impacts.

Sergio is a Civil Engineer with a PhD in Hydraulic Engineering and Environment, a Master’s degree in Sustainable Water Engineering, and specialisation in Water Resources Systems Analysis. His professional and research experience spans public policy in integrated water resources management, flood risk management, climate change adaptation, and land‑use planning. He has contributed as a researcher to multiple European, Spanish, and Colombian research and technology‑transfer projects. From 2014 to 2018, he served as an advisor to the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia. Between 2016 and 2020, he worked as a part‑time lecturer in the Department of Civil and Agricultural Engineering at the National University of Colombia, where he was also affiliated with the Research Group in Water Resources Engineering. From 2020 to 2023, Sergio was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain. Since 2022, he has been part of the Agroecosystems History Laboratory (AGROECOLOGYLAB) at Universidad Pablo de Olavide, where he is developing an emerging research line on the social metabolism of water in agroecosystems – or Agroecosystems Water Metabolism – integrating core principles of hydrology and agroecology. See details here.

Manuel González-de-Molina is Full Professor of Contemporary History. Coordinator of the Agroecosystems History Laboratory. His work focuses on the study of the contemporary rural world, the biophysical analysis of agroecosystems and food systems and the design of public policies from an agroecological point of view. Direct a Master Degree Program on Agroecology (International University of Andalusia and Pablo de Olavide University) from 1996 to now. President of the Spanish Society for Agrarian History (http://www.seha.info) from 2016 to 2023 and member of the editorial board of the ISI-refereed journals Historia Agraria [Agrarian History Review], Anthropoce; Sustainability; and Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Vice-president of the Spanish Society for Organic Agriculture (SEAE) since 2006 until 2014. Minister of the Department of Organic Agriculture of the Andalusia Government (Spain) from 2004 until 2007. Author of several books, among the most recent: The Social Metabolism. A socio-ecological theory of historical Change (Springer, 2014); Energy in Agroecosystems: A Tool for Assessing Sustainability (CRC Press, USA, 2017); Political Agroecology: Advancing the Transition to Sustainable Food Systems (CRC Press, 2019). Author of a hundred articles published in journals such as Environment and History, Ecological Economics, Land Use Policy, Environmental History; Regional Environmental Change; Ecology and Society; Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems; Journal of Interdisciplinary History; among others.

Bruno Fosso is Associate Professor in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics at University of Bari Aldo Moro and co-lead of the ELIXIR-IT Tools platform. He obtained a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2014 at the University of Bari discussing a thesis about the deployment of a workflow for DNA-metabarcodingd data analysis. The metagenomic investigation of host-associated microbiomes and environmental prokaryotic communities is the main topic of his research activity and recently he is also working on the application of ML/AI approaches on microbiome data. He is an active member the BITS, SIBBM, ISCB and ELIXIR Microbiome Community. He is the author of about 60 papers in international journals (H-index 26, Citation ≥ 2,200).

Graziano Pesole is full professor of Molecular Biology in the University of Bari A. Moro and Associate Researcher of CNR-IBIOM, Director of “Consorzio Interuniversitario Biotecnologie (Trieste), Head of the Italian Node of ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for Life Science.

Bibliometric facts: h-index: 87 (Google scholar), 80 (ResearchGate), 73 (Scopus); peer-reviewed publications: >400; sum of Times Cited without self-citations: >30,000, Scopus link: http://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.url?authorId=7005831630).

Graziano Pesole has since long carried out research activity in the fields of bioinformatics, comparative genomics and molecular evolution. His current research interests are focused on bioinformatics application for the management and analysis of next generation sequencing data, also at single-cell and spatial resolution.

He has developed several specialised databases and widely used analysis software and algorithms which are available as standalone software or through the web.

He leads a large interdisciplinary research group including molecular biologists, bioinformaticians and computer scientists.

He has been PI for several research projects funded by national (MIUR, CNR, Telethon, AIRC, AISM, ARISLA) and international (EU, NIH) agencies and currently leading several research projects funded by the Italian PNRR including the leadership of the Biocomputing spoke of the National Center for Gene Therapy and Drugs based on RNA technology (Total budget of the last 10 years: >10M€). He also filed several international patents.

He is member of the Editorial Board of several high-profile journals, and co-author of books on Bioinformatics, Genomics and Molecular Biology published by Italian (Zanichelli, Ambrosiana, Gnocchi) and international (Wiley) editors.

Agustín Riscos Núñez obtained his PhD degree in 2004 at Universidad de Sevilla. Since 2024, he serves as Full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of Universidad de Sevilla. He is member of the Direction Board of the “Smart Computer systems Research and Engineering Lab (SCORE)” unit of excellence, head of the “Research Group on Natural Computing (RGNC)”, founding researcher and member of the Direction Board of the “Research Institute of Computer Engineering (I3US)” at Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. In addition, he is one of the founding members of the “International Membrane Computing Society (IMCS)”, and IEEE Senior Member.

His main areas of expertise are bio-inspired computing (especially membrane computing) and artificial intelligence. His research interests mainly focus on computational complexity theory and computational modelling of complex systems, digital twins, and population dynamics in ecology, as well as other practical applications in the fields of artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, biomedicine, high performance computing and robotics. In particular, his group has experience in research towards the development of theoretical models accompanied by software simulation tools for prevention, control and decision making related to endangered species or exotic invasive species.

PhD in Biology from the University of Cádiz in 2016. Currently a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council.

Founding member of the European chapter of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, aiming to advance the science and applications of forecasts.

Director of 3 long-term biodiversity monitoring initiatives (on plants in heathlands and soil invertebrates in the Kalahari Desert).

Research integrates long-term data on plants and animals with advanced statistical and mechanistic models to predict how populations in drylands respond to extremes and human pressures.

Author of 50 peer-reviewed papers.

Animal ecologist with a primary focus on terrestrial ecosystems and poikilotherm organisms,
specialising in ecophysiology, metabolism, and species interactions, the development of
mechanistic ecological models, and addressing the effects of climate change and other
anthropogenic disturbances on poikilotherms.