CEO visit to LifeWatch Belgium

The LifeWatch General Assembly (GA) invited the newly appointed LifeWatch ERIC Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Christos Arvanitidis, to visit all national LifeWatch nodes. The first step on this tour was Belgium, so on Tuesday 18 June our CEO, accompanied by Juan Miguel González-Aranda, interim Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of LifeWatch ERIC, visited LifeWatch Belgium, at the premises of a principal partner, the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). 

LifeWatch ERIC is a geographically distributed infrastructure consisting of three common facilities (the Statutory Seat & ICT Core, the Service Centre and the VLab & Innovation Centre), and several Distributed Centres which contribute with in-kind activities on top of the states’ in-cash contributions. Therefore, LifeWatch CEO’s visits are of a particular importance as they are truly an opportunity to reinforce the level of engagement and synergy of National Centres within the Infrastructure and in its core activities.

At the heart of this visit, the LifeWatch ERIC CEO stated there is the need to set a general framework in formalising a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between LifeWatch Belgium and LifeWatch ERIC, thus providing a first example.

Each national Distributed Centre needs to develop and sign an SLA with LifeWatch ERIC. Each SLA shall detail the functional relationship between each national node and LifeWatch ERIC: what in-kind contributions the Distributed Centre is offering and where the Distributed Centre fits into the organisational structure and the Strategic Plan of LifeWatch ERIC. 

“It has truly been a pleasure for me coming to Belgium today,” the CEO added, “LifeWatch ERIC would not be the same without the huge efforts of LifeWatch Belgium and I am glad to have had the chance to meet with the people who are working hard every day to make it possible. My special thanks go to our current GA chair, Gert Verreet, (Department of Economy, Science and Innovation – EWI), for his dedication and commitment”.

Towards a cultural change | First LifeWatch ERIC Scientific Community Meeting

The Scientific Community Meeting held in Rome from 27 – 29 May 2019 was designed to bring together the wider LifeWatch ERIC scientific communities of researchers and developers to generate and advance the discussion of the most promising lines of scientific development. In the view of the conference coordinator, Alberto Basset, Interim Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce and Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento, the 3-day event hosted by the Italian National Research Council, leader of the Italian contribution to the infrastructure, “was a great success”.

A truly international event, the meeting boasted 150 participants from 12 different countries which, thanks to the contributions given by LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities and National Nodes (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain), delivered to its participants a rich programme featuring 20 plenary sessions and 40 presentations in working sessions. The Scientific Community Meeting was the first of its kind and ended in widespread positive feedback and calls for greater interdisciplinary cooperation.

The three days were structured around the three complimentary strands of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Theory, Marine Biodiversity & Ecosystem Functioning, and Data, Modelling & Supporting Disruptive Technologies. There was widespread appreciation of the e-Science capabilities that LifeWatch ERIC provides, and agreement that the architecture is flexible with a user-friendly interface.

Many technologies and innovative case studies were also on display: from remote sensor monitoring of fauna and flora populations, to collecting data on marine life. But beyond gizmos, the working groups ended up agreeing on the need for collaboration, to work across borders and to use metadata to create user stories that everyone can relate to, to create greater common understanding.

Over these three days in Rome, LifeWatch ERIC has moved closer to identifying major gaps in scientific knowledge that need to be addressed, has emphasised key societal challenges that biodiversity and ecosystem science are required to address, gathered indications of the services and VRE developments that user communities need, proposed innovative approaches, like the use of blockchain, and has identified the need to reinforce collaboration and trust. 

LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, closed proceedings by saying that the processes of life on this planet are complex; that we need complex infrastructures to model and understand that complexity, a task which no country can do alone; and that the scientific community has a responsibility to answer global concerns about climate change. He concluded, “We will use all our arsenal to integrate everything we have and try to give a synthetic knowledge to many more recipients, so we can make a proper response to society. All disciplines need to come together with open communication.”

LifeWatch Belgium

Belgium contributes to LifeWatch with varied and complementary “in-kind” contributions. These are implemented under the form of long-lasting projects by different research centers and universities spread over the country and supported by each respective political authority.

In a nutshell, access to regional and global biodiversity data systems is facilitated by means of several data services (Belgian LifeWatch E-lab), data publication to (Eur)OBIS and GBIF,  marine and non-marine data archaeology and the construction of a local marine-freshwater-terrestrial observatory.

A central Taxonomic Backbone combines taxonomic, biogeographical, trait and genomic data and disseminates this via web services.

LifeWatch Belgium is also the driving force behind the LifeWatch Marine Virtual Research Environment (VRE), the gateway to marine data resources and services related to the European LifeWatch infrastructure.

Four ecosystem dynamic descriptors are derived from satellite images. Their weekly average profiles are calculated at an European scale. Furthermore, a database describing homogeneous units of the landscape, ecotopes, has been developed.

Biodiversity.aq is building an Antarctic Biodiversity Information System (AntaBIS), as a thematic LifeWatch virtual laboratory.

The Barcoding facility for Organisms and tissues of Policy Concern (BopCo) project is setting up a virtual laboratory that uses molecular techniques to identify unknown biological material to species/population level.

Ph. Credits Photo Gallery / Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ)

LifeWatch ERIC and EMSO ERIC sign MoU

LifeWatch ERIC & EMSO ERIC sign MoU

LifeWatch ERIC and the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water-Column Observatory (EMSO ERIC) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen cooperation between the two infrastructures. They have agreed to join forces in designing and implementing ambitious joint research projects and collaborative initiatives, which will result in positive outcomes for the both related research areas. The MoU was signed by Jesús Miguel Santamaría, for LifeWatch ERIC, and Juanjo Dañobeitia, for EMSO ERIC.

With the MoU, LifeWatch ERIC and EMSO ERIC commit to fostering the use of common standards and protocols, exploring opportunities to further promote common free open access data and software policy, and advancing interoperability. They will establish synergies with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Copernicus and other pan European-international programmes and initiatives, and identify and implement collaborative projects of mutual interest. 

In greater detail, the two infrastructures will collaborate on the definition, development and integration of new parameters, instruments and methods for multi-disciplinary observation, addressing either biotic or abiotic parameters. They will also initiate joint actions to promote Ocean Literacy, and launch the new Citizen Science programmes.

Moreover, LifeWatch ERIC and EMSO ERIC will work together to lobby and advise government policy makers and funding bodies on environmental Grand Challenges themes, reinforce industry liaisons, and establish a mechanism to secure their continued maintenance and improvement of cooperation to meet common goals.

LifeWatch ERIC and EMSO ERIC are already operational and working to establish within the next three months, as a first step, a Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC), which will draft an action plan identifying specific research or technology development areas for collaboration.

ABOUT LifeWatch ERIC  

LifeWatch ERIC is a European Infrastructure Consortium that provides e-Science research facilities to scientists who seek to increase our knowledge and deepen our understanding of Biodiversity organisation and Ecosystem functions and services. It is a distributed research infrastructure with central components, Common Facilities, located in three Member States, and national branches in six countries.

LifeWatch ERIC’s purpose is to tackle the constraints affecting research activities and the pressing need for increasingly diverse data sets and larger and more advanced models. Through the use of open data and open science clouds, LifeWatch ERIC makes it possible to explore new frontiers in ecological science and support society in addressing the challenges ahead. LifeWatch ERIC avails itself of High-Performance, Grid and Big Data computing systems, and develops advanced modelling tools to implement management measures aimed at preserving life on Earth.

Contact details

Sara Montinaro
sara.montinaro[@]lifewatch.eu
+39 0832 29 48 18

ABOUT EMSO ERIC

The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory (EMSO) is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) which provides data infrastructure for continuous, high-resolution, (near-)real-time, ocean observations across a multidisciplinary range of research including biogeochemical, physics, engineering, and computer science. EMSO – a large-scale environmental European Research Infrastructure (RI) on the ESFRI Roadmap – analyses the water column from the surface down to the abyss and the sub-seafloor, and from polar to subtropical environments. It has eight deep-sea and three shallow Regional Facilities, deployed across the North Atlantic and through the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. EMSO makes fundamental contributions to our understanding of key environmental processes like climate change, marine biodiversity and natural hazards, and in the long-term vision of creating the European Ocean Observing System (EOOS) will play a key role providing on site observations for the COPERNICUS earth observation program.

Contact details

Alessandra Giuntini
alessandra.giuntini[@]ingv.it
+39 06 51860644

WoRMs: 10 new marine species from 2018

This year, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), a prominent component of the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone, has released its list of the top-ten marine species of 2018 to coincide with World Taxonomist Appreciation day – 19 March! 

Every day in labs, museums, out on fieldwork, taxonomists are busy collecting, cataloguing, identifying, comparing, describing and naming species new to science. Some 300 taxonomists globally also contribute their valuable time to keeping the World Register of Marine Species up to date. Today, WoRMS thanks its taxonomic editors for this important task, celebrating the work of taxonomists now with the WoRMS list of the top-ten marine species described in 2018 as nominated and voted for by taxonomists!

This top-ten list is just a small highlight of almost 2,000 fascinating new marine species discovered every year. Check LifeWatch Belgium website for more info.

If you were unaware of this celebration of all the work that taxonomists do, you can find more here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/taxonomistappreciationday, and here https://smallpondscience.com/2014/03/19/today-is-taxonomist-appreciation-day/ and here https://cetaf.org/news/19th-march-taxonomist-appreciation-day.

LifeWatch ERIC Data Centres Working Meeting

Biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems, including those precious services sustaining our life and our societies, are at risk, affecting the ecological sustainability of our Planet, our well-being and our future.

LifeWatch ERIC, the European e-Science Infrastructure of Biodiversity and Ecosystem research (portal.lifewatch.dev) has organised a meeting in Ljubljana, on 13–14 December 2019, discussing with representatives of Common Facilities, National Nodes and the wider Slovenian scientific community and partners in the LifeWatch Slovenia consortium on the vision, mission and operational priorities of the research infrastructure. The ambition was to deploy the proper e-Infrastructure to scientists in order to build the science-based knowledge needed by all stakeholders, including local communities, in order to address these key global challenges.

The meeting has been focused on biodiversity and ecosystem data management, since the data already available, and big data, that are going to be collected through new technologies and the work of thousands of scientists in Europe, are the foundation to build the new knowledge required within the context of climate changes and biodiversity loss. However, it is necessary that Open Science becomes a reality and proper tools, allowing scientists to find, access, integrate, re-use and analyse the data already collected by the scientific community, actually developed and made available. These issues and the organisation of Distributed Data Centres on biodiversity and ecosystem research have been discussed in the meeting with the contribution of scientists from Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia LifeWatch Nodes, as well as from other environmental research infrastructures, particularly researchers also contributing to DiSSCo, Distributed Systems for Scientific Collections.

The meeting has also highlighted the global relevance of the scientific research of the Slovenian Institutions on biodiversity and ecosystems to address these global challenges from experience on model ecosystem types distributed at the Biosphere scale and relevant in the context of climate change.

Metadata, Vocabularies & Ontologies

On 12 & 13 November, the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre organised the first working meeting on “Metadata, Controlled Vocabularies and Ontologies” in Lecce, Italy.

The aim of the meeting was to set a roadmap for a common strategy to be adopted on metadata, controlled vocabularies and ontologies within the LifeWatch ERIC community and in accordance with the FAIR principles.

The meeting witnessed the participation of 13 experts, with both scientific and technical backgrounds, from Coomon Facilities and national nodes of LifeWatch ERIC (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Slovenia,  Spain, The Netherlands). Three sessions were held on 1) Metadata, 2) Controlled Vocabularies, and 3) Ontologies, each one including a tour de table on existing approaches in the national nodes and a discussion to define common best practices for the implementation and curation of metadata, standardized controlled vocabularies and ontologies.

Presentations, foreseen for each session, outlined previous work and set the current landscape of models, tools and technologies that are available to support metadata, controlled vocabularies and ontologies within national nodes of LifeWatch ERIC. They also provided material for following discussions, where the main technical and scientific approaches about the semantic issues in the Research Infrastructures have been also considered in order to identify a common strategy to be adopted by LifeWatch ERIC.   

Great success for LifeWatch ERIC at EMBS53

The 53rd European Marine Biology Symposium, organised by LifeWatch Belgium and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Ostend (Belgium, 17 to 21 September 2018), witnessed a great success with the participation of 169 researchers and academics from 25 different countries.

LifeWatch ERIC was deeply involved in the symposium, first of all thanks to its Belgian National Node, which co-organised the event, and to the participation of many members of the broader LifeWatch ERIC marine community who actively took part, such as LifeWatchGreece.

Many the researches and key scientists from LifeWatch ERIC who intervened during the symposium, making clear how large Research Infrastructures such as LifeWatch ERIC have a pivotal role to play by empowering research with the potential of ICT resources, tools and virtual research environments, paving the way for an unprecedented progress to a better and evidence-based science, in support of the need for bigger and more diverse data and advanced models, allowing to reach new frontiers by ground-breaking research in the marine biology domain.

The “Science in a modern era” session focused exactly on these issues, featuring Christos Arvanitidis and Francisco Hernandez (Scientific responsible for LifeWatchGreece and LifeWatch Belgium, respectively) as its chairmen, and counted many oral communications from the LifeWatch ERIC community. LifeWatch ERIC was also featured in the “Science from a historical perspective” session and in the “Science in the North Sea” session.

The programme and all presented abstracts are available for download at the following address http://www.embs53.org/conference-programme

In parallel, LifeWatch Belgium exhibition booth allowed demonstrations of several infrastructure components of the Belgian marine LifeWatch observatory, such as plankton imaging devices, acoustic detection devices and the innovative underwater tripod with acoustic release system.

Should you wish to find out more about the symposium, information, abstract book and presentations are available on the conference website (http://www.embs53.org).

In 2019, the 54th EMBS will be held in Dublin, Ireland, from 25 to 29 August (www.embs54.org).

EMBS53: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

17–21 September 2018 (Ostend, Belgium)

From 17–21 September 2018, the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) and LifeWatch Belgium will be organising the 53rd edition of the European Marine Biology Symposium (EMBS53) in Ostend, Belgium.

The EMBS53 Organising & Scientific Committee are pleased to welcome your abstract submissions for oral papers and scientific posters. We particularly welcome papers on ‘Marine Biology from a Historical Perspective’, ‘Science in a Modern Era’, ‘Marine and Coastal Citizen Science’ and ‘Science in the North Sea’. Submission can take place from 15 January – 15 April 2018.

Please note that no extensions to the deadline will be granted and that presenting authors are responsible for registration, travel and accommodation costs. Presenters who are unable to attend should arrange for another qualified individual to present the paper or poster in question (with notification to the Organising Committee).

We are glad to announce that the Journal of the Marine Biological Association (JMBA) kindly offers to publishing a special issue of the EMBS53 conference (October 2019). Everyone who contributes a poster or an oral presentation at the EMBS53 is invited to submit a manuscript by 7 December 2018. All manuscripts will go through a peer-review process.

Important dates

Registration & abstract submission opened: 15 January 2018
Deadline abstract submission (there will be NO extension of the deadlines): 15 April 2018
Notification on abstract acceptance: 15 May 2018
Deadline early bird registration: 31 May 2018
Deadline late registration: 31 August 2018
EMBS53: 17–21 September 2018

More information: www.embs53.org

LW BE 1st Users & Stakeholders Meeting

LifeWatch Belgium held its first Users & Stakeholders meeting in Ostend, on 25 and 26 January 2018.

The meeting was open to all known users and stakeholders of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure. In total, 87 participants from a multitude of Belgian research institutes and universities, registered for this very interesting and successful event.

Please read below for an account of the meeting.

The meeting was open to all known users and stakeholders of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure. In total, 87 participants from a multitude of Belgian research institutes and universities, registered for this very interesting and successful event.

Day 1 (Thursday January 25th 2018) started with a view from the science-policy perspective on the LifeWatch ESFRI; and an introduction about LifeWatch as a European e-science infrastructure to support biodiversity and ecosystem research. After a presentation about the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone, the Belgian LifeWatch partners each presented a comprehensive overview of their ongoing projects, the achieved results from the previous years and the future plans. The remainder of the day, these infrastructure projects and their applications were showcased more into detail in the form of several user stories.
 
Participants learned about (1) Catrein: towards a cameratrap research infrastructure; (2) DNA Barcoding for Forensics; (3) Detection and identification of mosquito species (Culicidae) in Belgium; (4) Saigas on the brink: multi-disciplinary analysis of the factors influencing mass mortality events; (5) The use of ecotopes for biodiversity conservation: the case of Violet Coper (Lycaena helle); (6) ANTABIS: feedback and perspectives from a long-term user; and (7) EMODnet Biology as a user of the LifeWatch infrastructure. Day 1 was concluded with 2 presentations by international LifeWatch partners: LifeWatch Greece and LifeWatch Sweden, thus demonstrating the international collaborations of LifeWatch Belgium.

On Day 2 (Friday January 26th 2018), the user stories continued: (8) Towards a qualitative spatial sensor network for long term observation of harbor porpoises; (9) Is this for (r)eel? Permanent fish tracking in Flanders with acoustic telemetry; (10) GPS-tracking migration and foraging movements of Western Marsh Harrier Circus aeruginosus breeding in the Low Countries; (11) From GPS data to daily decisions in 2 sympatric gull species; (12) Long-term monitoring of climate change effects on short vegetation; (13) Building and using the MarineSPEED benchmark dataset; and (14) Linking occurrences, traits and the environment to map the diversity of marine life.

During Friday afternoon, twelve demonstrations were organized to familiarize participants with LifeWatch tools and systems. Guided demo tours led the participants through interactive demonstrations on LifeWatch Data Explorer; Swedish LifeWatch Analysis Portal; New Antarctic Biodiversity Data Portal; European Tracking Network (ETN); Live demo of the camera traps; Live demo of the ZooScan; LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone; LifeWatch Marine VRE; LifeWatch Wallonia-Brussels WebGIS; Knock knock, who’s there? (bat calls); RGBIF package; and WateRinfo package.

The agenda can be consulted on the link below. The user stories abstract booklet can be downloaded here.

The event clearly demonstrated that the Belgian LifeWatch community is quite active. The multitude of interesting and impressive user stories showcased the individual projects that are going on and the immense progress LifeWatch Belgium is making.