LifeWatch-ERIC

The RvLab makes use of "R" which is a statistical processing environment widely used by scientists working in many biodiversity related disciplines. It supports an integrated and optimized (in respect to computational speed-up and data manipulation) online R environment. This vLab tackles common problems faced by R users, such as severe computational power deficit. Many of the routines operating under the R environment, such as the calculation of several biodiversity indices and the running of the multivariate analyses, are often of high computational demand and cannot deliver a result when the respective datasets are in the form of large matrices.

In the marine domain, LifeWatch provides data services for a large and broad user community dealing with a variety of data types. Activities include provision of data tools and services for taxonomic, ecological, omics, biogeographic, environmental and biological observation data.

Tools for data archiving, access, quality control, standardization, harmonization, analysis and publication are integrated in a Marine Virtual Research Environment (Marine VRE).

In this regard, the LifeWatch Marine VRE aspires to be the transparent gateway to access, analyze and develop marine data resources.

The LifeWatch e-Infrastructure has realised the Phytoplankton Virtual Research Environment (Phyto VRE), a collaborative working environment supporting researches on phytoplankton assemblages and their relative structure, organization and ecological function.

Phytoplankton plays an important role in aquatic ecosystems because it accounts for most of global primary production and affects the biogeochemical processes, trophic dynamics and biodiversity architecture.