Habitat Mapping: From Science and Policy Needs to Solutions

Aveiro, Portugal, 3 May 2024

Join us at the University of Aveiro (Rectory building – Senado room) for the workshop “Habitat Mapping: From Science and Policy Needs to Solutions” organised by LifeWatch Portugal in collaboration with all LifeWatch Common Facilities and National Distributed Centers. This gathering will explore the nexus between science, policy, and innovative solutions in habitat mapping. The agenda includes plenary sessions introducing LifeWatch TCS, showcasing indicators, and a World Café workshop on services, community needs, and integration strategies. The day concludes with discussions on future TCS-community interactions.

To register, please fill in this form.

Agenda

Times refer to the Portuguese time zone (UTC).

Plenary

  • 14:00 | Welcome
  • 14:05 | Introduction LifeWatch Thematic Core Service (TCS) by Alberto Basset (LifeWatch ERIC Service Center)
  • 14:15 | Introduction LifeWatch Thematic Core Service (TCS) by Tiago Múrias (LifeWatch Portugal) + Q&A
  • 14:30 | Habitat Mapping by LifeWatch Belgium by Julien Radoux (remote)
  • 14:45 | Showcasing indicators developed by LifeWatch (WGs) Portugal (LifeWatch Portugal)

Workshop – World Café

15:00 – 16:30

Moderators: Ana Lillebø, Bruna Oliveira, Daniel Crespo

  • Topic 1 – | What is already in place in terms of services (within and outside of LifeWatch ERIC)?
  • Topic 2 – | What are the community’s needs and requirements, and how can we identify these?
  • Topic 3 – | How can we further integrate this into the infrastructure?

Plenary

  • 16:30 | How to organise this TCS-community interaction for the future? Moderated by Ana Lillebø of LifeWatch Portugal / University of Aveiro
  • 17:00 | Wrap-up by Alberto Basset / Ana Lillebø
  • 17:30 | End of the session

LifeWatch ERIC BEeS Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference

Bees Conference

Seville, Spain, 22–24 May 2023.

This Biodiversity Day, don’t miss out on the LifeWatch ERIC BEes Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference “Threats and challenges to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation from an eScience perspective”.

Submit your abstracts until 30 April on the following topics: major threats to the Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem health, Macroecological and biogeographical approaches to biodiversity conservation, Ecosystem and habitat mapping, Animal biology and behavioral traits, “System of systems” biodiversity observation, Biodiversity and ecosystem responses to climate change, and finally, Natural capital and the “One Health” approach. There will also be a round table on the theme of World Biodiversity Day, moderated by LifeWatch ERIC and keynote speakers.

Visit the conference minisite to sign up and/or submit your abstract.

Workshop: Online Bioinformatic Platforms to Support Metabarcoding and Metagenomics Research and Applications

Porto, Portugal, 26-28 February 2020. The pan-European Workshop, held in the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO-InBIO) at the Vairão campus of the University of Porto, Portugal, boasted a very specific title: ‘Online Bioinformatic Platforms to Support Metabarcoding and Metagenomics Research and Applications’.

The workshop witnessed more than 30 participants from nine European countries (Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland) with different expertise and backgrounds, ranging from metagenomics and metabarcoding, to ecology and ICT.

The workshop was jointly organised with PORBIOTA/LifeWatch Portugal, DNAqua-Net (dedicated to the protection, preservation and restoration of aquatic ecosystems and their functions) and the EnvMetaGen project at InBIO (Research Network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology). LifeWatch ERIC supported its organisation as part of its Internal Joint Initiative on Non-indigenous and Invasive Species. The workshop explored the architecture and function of an online bioinformatics platform capable to address as many needs of the scientific community as possible, such as:

1) Checking existing distributed Bioinformatics e-Resources within the LifeWatch ERIC communities of practice,

2) Reaching a common understanding of users’ requirements and needs in Virtual Research Environments, and

3) Proposing an efficient and realistic and engaging mechanism from an ICT perspective, capable of federating those e-Resources within the LifeWatch ERIC VREs.

Examples of evidence-based research were provided by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), MIRRI (Microbial Research Resource Infrastructure), ELIXIR (which unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the ever-growing volumes of data generated), other Research Infrastructures and Bioinformatics initiatives.

The outcome of the Online Bioinformatic Platforms Workshop was a plan with well-identified next steps towards the co-construction of the bioinformatic platform.

Presentations:

Christos Arvanitidis | LifeWatch ERIC – mission and recent developments. Download PDF

Rocío Bautista | Bioinformatic analysis at SCBI. Download PDF

Pedro Beja | Next generation sequencing: Opportunities and challenges of a disruptive techmology for biodiversity assessment and monitoring. Download PDF

Bopco & JEMU | The Barcoding Facility for Organisms and Tissues of Policy Concern & The Joint Experimental Molecular Unit. Download PDF

CIBIO | Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources. Download PDF

CNR-IBIOM | Infrastructure, data and analysis resources. Download PDF

Day 2 Session 3 | What should be the characteristics of online bioinformatics platforms in LifeWatch ERIC? Download PDF

Mafalda Galhardo | Metabarcoding and data processing pipelines. Download PDF 

Juan Miguel González-Aranda |  Towards the establishment of a LifeWatch ERIC bioinformatics platform.  Download PDF

Tine Grebenc & Nataša Šibanc | Slovenian Forestry Institute. Download PDF

Matjaž Gregorič | Spider webs as a source of eDNA. Download PDF

Marta Goberna | Spanish Institute for Agricultural Research, Department of Environment and Agronomy. Download PDF

Pascal Hablützel | VLIZ’s ambition for online bioformatic platforms to support metabarcoding and metagenomics research. Download PDF 

Florian Leese | DNA-based aquatic bioassessment in Europe and beyond: Chances and challenges. Download PDF

Jennifer Leonard | Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics Group, Doñana. Download PDF

Florian Mauffrey | Development of a molecular diatoms index for water quality assessment of Swiss rivers.  Download PDF

Niklas Noll | Going through a metabarcoding workflow – pointing out problems and proposing solutions for a bioinformatics platform.  Download PDF

Alberto Pallavicini | Units of the Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste.  Download PDF

Christina Pavloudi & Haris Zafeiropoulos | LifeWatchGreece Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. Download PDF

Sergei Põlme | UNITE: Curated and evolving databases for molecular identification and for communicating fungal species. Download PDF

TiBE2020 Metabarcoding and Metagenomics

Online, 9-11 December 2020. The tenth edition of the Trends in Biodiversity and Evolution (TiBE) conference will be virtual this year and focus on Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. The meeting, held over three afternoons, will discuss exciting developments associated with the advent of ever more powerful DNA sequencing technologies, which are opening possibilities to explore the living world in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

This annual event is organised by CIBIO-InBIO, the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, connected through PORBIOTA with LifeWatch Portugal. It brings together senior researchers, post-graduate and graduate students working in the fields of biodiversity and evolutionary biology, to discuss cutting-edge findings in topics related to metabarcoding and metagenomic techniques, and their application in ecological and environmental research. The Conference is jointly organised by the CompBio and ApplEcol research groups. It will be hosted on an online platform that will facilitate networking opportunities and allow poster presentations. The program, including both plenary and short presentations from selected abstracts, is divided into three sessions:

• Molecular surveys of biodiversity and invasive species

• Next generation biomonitoring of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems

• Understanding species in interactions in complex ecosystems.

Abstracts are invited either as 15-minute oral presentations, or as 2-minute poster videos. Please note that only registered participants will be accepted as presenting authors. The abstract submission deadline is 27 October, 2020.