LifeWatch ERIC in RItrainPlus Project

RItrainPlus

LifeWatch ERIC is pleased to announce its collaboration in the RItrainPlus Horizon2020 project as both a beneficiary and an associated partner.* This project has the potential to bring a great deal of added value to LifeWatch ERIC because of the unique context in which it operates, at the nexus of international scientific and political realities.

But what is RItrainPlus?

RItrainPlus is a project designed to aid Research Infrastructures (RIs) and advanced scientific facilities, ensuring they have the management skills to deal with all aspects of their operation (governance, management, organisational, financial, etc.). The RItrainPlus project will transform the skills-base to drive the professionalisation, efficiency and long-term value creation of European Research Infrastructures and Core Facilities.

What exactly does it do?

In essence, this Project brings together RIs, core facilities, business management schools and European universities, to transform the access and empowerment of human resources for national and international scientific facilities in Europe. Just a handful of its objectives include: providing a coaching programme for managers; connecting RIs to the EOSC and the ERIC Forum; and encouraging staff and knowledge exchange through short-term mobility programmes. In addition, RItrainPlus is looking to establish a European School for Management of Research Infrastructures (ESMRI), a dedicated sustainable training organisation providing specialised training courses and workshops to meet the needs for professional skills in this context.

What role does LifeWatch ERIC play?

The main contribution of LifeWatch ERIC will mainly consist of co-designing a new model of online transdisciplinary RI-related staff CVs, based on Blockchain technologies (using the LifeWatch ERIC “LifeBlock” platform) to facilitate dynamic staff exchange, incentivisation and visibility based on the accounting of distributed activities performed by Research Infrastructures, particularly in the EU-LAC area. The Infrastructure will also contribute to the following tasks, among others: the development of common European policies and learning tracking for curricula enrichment, instructional design methodology, and the production of a trainers’ kit, which will be co-led with UNIMIB. LifeWatch ERIC staff Juan Miguel González-Aranda, CTO & ICT-Core Director (PI), and Elisa Morón-López, ICT-Core Project Manager, attended the kick-off meeting of Work Package 3 “Course development and delivery” on 21 July 2021.

For more information on RItrainPlus, please visit its website.

*grant agreement No. 101008503, duration 2021–2025

LifeWatch ERIC in DOORS Project Kick-Off Meeting

DOORS Project

LifeWatch ERIC was proud to represent part of the pan-European contingent of 37 partners in the kick-off meeting for the new EU project ‘DOORS’, led by GeoEcoMar, on 29–30 June 2021. The meeting was launched by Wendy Bonne of the European Commission and Mr Ciprian Teleman, Romanian Minister of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation, who said:

“DOORS represents a clear commitment of the European Union for the Black Sea, which will enable a climate neutral, sustainable and productive blue economy. Education, Research and innovation is the Golden Triangle for the knowledge-based economy to strengthen the links between Romanian and European scientists.”

But what is DOORS?

DOORS is a €9m Horizon 2020 project* that stands for ‘Developing Optimal and Open Research Support’ in the Black Sea, which is infamously the world’s most polluted. It will link science, policy and industry for critical Black Sea regeneration, bringing together expertise and technology from institutions from the Black Sea region and other European countries to address the human and climate change impacts on damaged ecosystems.

What exactly will it do?

DOORS will develop a common framework of scientific methods for gathering data, allowing partners to better understand the complex marine processes that happen across the Black Sea. The project will provide a system that will bring together information from in-situ measurements, research cruises, satellite observation, modelling and data integration capabilities.
Alongside the integration of scientific knowledge sharing, it is a fundamental objective for DOORS to engage with wider society. By providing mechanisms for business to link with research, DOORS will create new job opportunities for emerging Blue Growth economies through new synergies and mentoring schemes; the first of its kind to be setup in the Black Sea. Key initiatives that engage schools, universities and general citizens of the region will promote behaviour change and celebrate best practice, influencing future policy, Blue Growth and the health of Black Sea communities.

What role will LifeWatch ERIC play?

LifeWatch ERIC will be participating in Work Package 2: Harmonisation; 6: Blue Growth; 7: Capacity Building; 8: Stakeholder Engagement; and 9: Dissemination and Communication. Alberto Basset, Service Centre Director and project coordinator for LifeWatch ERIC, noted: 

“LifeWatch ERIC’s strong ties with the biodiversity and ecosystem research communities, along with its specialist knowledge in data integration and providing training activities will ensure the infrastructure’s contribution to all three of the DOORS project’s core pillars: System of Systems, Blue Growth Accelerator and Knowledge Transfer and Training. We look forward to strengthening and establishing connections in the Black Sea research community through DOORS, confident that the results of this project will be advantageous for both citizens and scientists of the Black Sea area, as well as Europe as a whole.”

Click here for the DOORS website. You can also follow its activities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

*grant agreement No. 101000518

EOSC Future: Call for Evaluators

EOSC Future

LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be a partner in the EOSC Future project, which, over the next two and a half years, will develop an environment with professional data services, open research products and infrastructure. It looks to create a so-called ‘system of systems’ that will support European researchers in managing the entire data lifecycle: from sharing, managing and exploiting their own data to discovering, re-using and recombining the datasets of others. The project will engage, train and support (potential) EOSC users and will encourage providers to sign up by offering easy onboarding, ticket management and analytics.

Since its official kick-off meeting on 10 June, the project has launched a call for external evaluators, seeking experts to evaluate a series of diverse grants to be awarded by the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Though the call will remain open for submissions until June 2023,  experts will be called on to evaluate grant applications as soon as October 2021.

To enable the co-creation of EOSC, via early adoption, technical and domain solution development and interoperability, RDA will be running a rich set of regular open calls. The RDA Open Calls mechanism is backed by a €1 000 000 grant earmarked for engaging with multiple stakeholders, including targeted scientific communities, technical experts and early career researchers. The calls will be complemented by a broad range of support activities, such as events, use cases, info packages, best practices, a Scientific Ambassador Network and dedicated RDA groups. These activities will enable a continual innovation workflow and engagement with science projects to support the implementation of an EOSC environment.  

In keeping with its principles of transparent and community-driven action, RDA is looking for external expert evaluators to support the decision-making process for awarding the RDA Open Calls grants. These evaluators will operate remotely via the EOSC Future Grants Platform and will be responsible for evaluating applications for RDA Open Calls, both for general and discipline- or domain-specific grants. While the call for external expert evaluators is open for the entire duration of the EOSC Future project, evaluators will be needed as soon as October 2021. Evaluators will be routinely selected from the pool of applicants based on their availability and the expertise required. Aside from a few exceptional cases, drafting an individual evaluation report will be compensated with a €150 fee (equivalent to 0.3 working days). 

Experts can submit their applications via the dedicated EOSC Future Grants Platform, which will manage the grants application process for all calls under EOSC Future‘s €1.6 million grant fund. This includes the €1 000 000 in grants under the RDA Open Calls as well as another €600 000 awarded through various DIH Calls.

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.


Researchers grab chance to experiment with LifeWatch ERIC tools at Hands-on Session

Screenshot of Hands-on Session featuring smiling participants

On Friday 4 June 2021, as a follow-up to the successful e-Science for NIS Research Workshop on 20-21 May, LifeWatch ERIC gave researchers the opportunity to try out LifeWatch ERIC-developed software at a Hands-on Session. It marked the debut of key tools built by LifeWatch ERIC as part of its Internal Joint Initiative (IJI) in its quest to facilitate open access data in the domains of biodiversity and ecosystem research.

All training resources, including presentations, demos and manuals are available through the LifeWatch ERIC Training Platform. (Please note, those who missed out on the Session can find the relevant materials simply by following the link to the training programme and creating an account).

After an introduction from CTO and ICT-Core Director Juan Miguel González-Aranda, together with Service Director Alberto Basset, the floor was given to technical staff, Lucia Vaira, Xeni Kechagioglou, Antoni Huguet Vives, Nikos Miandakis and Antonio José Saénz Albanés, to explain and demonstrate the Metadata Catalogue and the Tesseract VRE, which was illustrated using the Crustaceans Workflow (presented at the Workshop on 20 May). After the presentations and demonstrations, participants were given the opportunity to try the services and workflows for themselves, interacting with the trainers who provided guidance and feedback.

The session was brought to a close with input from Juan Miguel González-Aranda, who reiterated the importance of continued feedback and exchange with the scientific community in order for LifeWatch ERIC to refine and improve its services. CEO Christos Arvanitidis then thanked everyone who took part, noting that the Session was just the beginning of the results LifeWatch ERIC has to showcase after its first five years of hard work alongside dedicated collaborators. He also highlighted that LifeWatch ERIC is leading an important Work Package as part of the EOSC Future project, and how the efforts of everyone involved will ensure that LifeWatch ERIC services can be deployed on the EOSC platform, benefiting a wider audience than ever before.

LifeWatch ERIC in BiCIKL Kick-Off Meeting

BiCiKL

The kick-off meeting for the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) took place last week on 27-28 May! LifeWatch ERIC is proud to be one of the fourteen official partners of this Horizon 2020 project,* contributing to the establishment of open science practices in the biodiversity domain as it follows its own mission to become a worldwide provider of content and services for this research community.

But what is BiCIKL?

BiCIKL is an EU-funded project coordinated by Pensoft that aims to unite key European and international research infrastructures across ten countries in their quest to facilitate open science and fair data practices in the biodiversity scientific community. Its four key products have been identified as: a community equipped with tools for searching and accessing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) interlinked data; an interlinked corpora of knowledge for biodiversity and related research domains; automated tools and workflows for data liberation and FAIRisation from literature; and semantic-based journal production workflows for publication and reuse of FAIR biodiversity data.

What exactly does it do?

BiCIKL plans to build a Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, providing access to data, associated tools and services at each stage and along the entire research cycle. Speaking technically, it will focus on harvesting, liberating, linking and reusing subarticle level data literature (specimens, material citations, samples, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables, etc.), whether PDF- or XML-based. It will provide seamless linking and usage tracking of data along the line: specimens → sequences → species → analytics → publications → biodiversity knowledge graph → re-use.

What role does LifeWatch ERIC play?

LifeWatch ERIC, which already carries out specialised work in the areas of semantics and usage tracking, will be key in helping BiCIKL develop the methods, tools and workflows required for the realisation of BiCIKL goals. Its two main tasks will be to analyse the technical requirement of users and implement the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BiKH). It will participate in testing and streamlining interoperability and the alignment of findability, reuse and accessibility. Furthermore, LifeWatch ERIC will contribute to defining and implementing the necessary operational framework, as well as identifying BiKH components and translating the functional diagramme and operational framework into an educational cloud.


BiCIKL’s website is currently under construction, but you can follow its activities on Twitter.


*grant agreement No. 101007492, duration May 2021-2024

LifeWatch ERIC showcases: new technology for biodiversity researchers

The 20–21 May was an important milestone for the LifeWatch ERIC, as it hosted its long-anticipated e-Science for NIS workshop, albeit in a virtual form due to the ongoing pandemic. The workshop was organised with the support of ENVRI-FAIR, and was hugely successful, attracting over 220 registrations. The aim of the event was to showcase the results of five research endeavours, known as validation cases, into Non-indigenous and Alien Species (NIS) conducted over the last 18 months within the LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative.

These validation cases led to the development of five separate workflows, created through the joint effort of scientists and ICT experts, both from LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities and Distributed Centres, to accommodate the data and analytical processes generally required by the NIS scientific community. In turn, these workflows have been integrated into Tesseract technical composability layer, the new Virtual Research Environment (VRE) platform being developed by LifeWatch ERIC. Both the innovative advances in technology and the associated scientific reports sparked engaged and enthusiastic discussion over the two days. In fact, the workshop proved to be particularly appreciated by attendees, with 85% rating it as “very good” or “excellent”, as well as the web-services presented also considered “very good” or “excellent” by 78% of participants.

LifeWatch ERIC is at the service of the biodiversity and ecosystem research community, and is constantly seeking to create opportunities for mutual exchange. For this reason, the presentations of the validation cases were complemented by a series of round tables, featuring academics and experts from a wide range of fields. The speakers debated the ecological, economic and social impact of NIS, and the need to work across disciplines, combining social and natural sciences. The final consensus was that greater coordination of data collections is required in order to integrate existing data from different sources, and find ways to enable access to such collections.

Non-indigenous Invasive Species have enormous impacts on ecosystem services, human health and on the economy. This is why LifeWatch ERIC was proud to present the results of the validation cases providing powerful and flexible workflows capable of integrating more data and services than has yet been possible. The workflows will be available in the LifeWatch ERIC Tesseract VRE, which among its many innovative functions, enable the import of data from different sources, their exploration in maps for validation, and the use of standard tools to connect data analytics through its HPC and cloud-related technologies. Tesseract is also built around the unique LifeWatch ERIC tool known as LifeBlock, which uses Blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of all data inputs and full recognition for contributors. The VRE is not only an innovative tool that can be customised to other bioregions, but it will continue to evolve in the light of future feedback from scientists. In the long run, the use of Tesseract will contribute to boosting social awareness about biodiversity and help policymakers concerned about habitat conservation to implement sound science-based decisions.

LifeWatch ERIC would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the superb efforts of all the team members involved, and to thank ENVRI-FAIR Science Cluster for its support during the workshop, as well as all the wonderful speakers and participants who actively contributed to make this 2-day workshop a success and with whom LifeWatch ERIC hopes to continue working in the future.

The recording of the workshop will shortly be made available, in the meantime, you can find the workshop presentations here.

e-Science for NIS Research Workshop

NIS WORKSHOP

On 20–21 May 2021, LifeWatch ERIC will be hosting the online workshop “e-Science for NIS Research”, with the support of the ENVRI-FAIR Project. The workshop will showcase the results of four validation cases into Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS) conducted over the last 18 months within the LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative. Registration is compulsory and free of charge.

The first day will be dedicated to the marine domain, with sessions focusing on the long-term monitoring of hard-bottom marine communities and marine/transitional NIS occurrence and trophic niches dynamics. LifeWatch ERIC and Distributed Centre staff will also be presenting workflows using photographic, metabarcoding and stable isotope tools to extract and analyse data of different typologies from varying sources.

The second day will be devoted to the terrestrial domain, with a particular focus on the detection and monitoring of invaders through remote sensing and habitat vulnerability to NIS and impact on biotopes. Presenters will also showcase workflows involving the use of satellite and occurrence data, combining different statistical and machine-learning algorithms to map the distribution of invaders and identify which habitats are most at risk.

The workshop programme will be enriched with several round tables, covering hot topics within the biodiversity and ecosystem research community such as cooperation between Research Infrastructures, the impact of NIS on marine ecosystems as well as their impact on economy and society, disruptive technologies for NIS research and how open science and open access can benefit researchers.

As a follow-up to the workshop, a hands-on training session on the use of the four workflows and Virtual Research Environments (VRE) will be held on 4 June, subject to sufficient interest. The full programme and any relevant updates can be found here. 

Science, Technology and Innovation: Transfiere 2021

A tantalising glimpse into post-pandemic life last week as Transfiere, Spain’s biggest professional and multi-sectoral forum for knowledge and technology, was given the green light to be held in-person. Over 2,000 professionals attended Transfiere 2021 in Málaga on 14 and 15 April, among whom the LifeWatch ERIC Common Facility in Spain and LifeWatch Spain Node. That the annual Forum was allowed to go ahead (with health and safety measures in place) confirms its status as one of the most valuable intellectual exchanges on technology transfer and innovation for research ecosystems in Southern Europe.

Staying true to form, the organisers behind Transfiere 2021 made it possible to check in to more than 3,000 meetings with potential partners, among which some 30 universities and research institutions. Many important bilateral meetings and presentations took place, one such being the table on the Circular Economy, where LifeWatch ERIC’s Chief Technical Officer, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, spoke alongside other eminent participants such as representatives of Airbus, Mercadona, CDTI and several Innovation Technology Parks.

Meanwhile, at LifeWatch ERIC’s own dedicated exhibition booth, the ERDF Andalusia programme was met with keen interest by the hundreds of visitors to the stand. During such institutional visits and working meetings at the booth, LifeWatch ERIC staff were only too happy to reply to the inundation of questions and requests received, highlighting LifeWatch ERIC’s increasingly salient profile in the research sector.

Institutional interest in LifeWatch ERIC at Transfiere 2021

Institutional interest in LifeWatch ERIC: New collaborative partnerships sealed with handshakes at Transfiere 2021

Transfiere 2021, from 14–15 April in Málaga, Spain was all about sharing scientific, technological and innovation knowledge to promote innovation and connect science and business. The perfect forum, in fact for LifeWatch ERIC to show its prowess and competitiveness. LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer Juan Miguel González-Aranda jointly with staffers from the Common Facility in Spain and the LifeWatch Spain Node welcomed at the LifeWatch ERIC booth a number of visits from representatives of local, regional, national and international governments, universities, and other research centres.

On Wednesday, 14 April, Enrique Playán-Jubilar, Director of the Spanish State Research Agency-Ministry of Science and Innovation, and Teresa Serrano-Gotarredona, Directorate General of Research & Knowledge Transfer – Regional Government of Andalusia-Junta de Andalusia visited our booth. Thursday, 15 April was the turn of Elías Bendodo Benasayag, Minister of the Presidency of the Junta de Andalucía, Francisco de la Torre Mayor of Málaga, and Jesús Alonso Sánchez Secretary General of Science, Technology & Innovation at the Regional Government-Junta de Extremadura.  These high-ranking officials showed strong support and reaffirmed their commitment to the projects and initiatives on display and took a great interest in LifeWatch ERIC.  

We were also honoured by the visit of other public administration representatives and decision makers in the field of sustainable ecosystems management and services, including: Raúl Jiménez Jiménez, recently appointed as Managing Director of the Andalusian Digitalisation Agency, a long-time supporter of LifeWatch ERIC through the Smart Food ERDF Andalusia project; Inmaculada Aguilar Nacher, DG of the Spanish Science and Technology Foundation-FECYT, accompanied by Borja Izquierdo, International Science Department Director at FECYT; Daniel Escacena Ortega, Director of Projects in the Andalusia Knowledge Agency-Junta de Andalusia; the Rectors of the Pablo de Olavide and Málaga Universities, Francisco Oliva Blázquez and José Ángel Narváez Bueno, respectively; and Fernando Ferrero Álvarez-Rementería, Director for Strategic Investments at IDEA-Junta de Andalusia, among others

This level of interest at such an intense forward-looking forum is a great tribute to, and recognition of, the role LifeWatch ERIC can play in contributing to new EU Green Deal-based and circular socioeconomics models. New collaborative initiatives were also forged with South Africa and Bulgaria.