Internal Joint Initiative

Rationale for the Internal Joint Initiative

The warnings of 15,000 scientists, of the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21) and now of the UN Global Assessment Study clearly demonstrate that humanity is bringing our life support system, the biosphere, to the point of collapse. The effort to counteract this current loss of biodiversity requires concrete actions at all levels. For science, it means improving our current level of knowledge, to move beyond the present fragmentation of science, and to foster greater complementarity and synergy between disciplines, by developing new inter-disciplinary paradigms and starting to build synthetic knowledge, so as to boost innovation and involve more young scientists and civil society.

LifeWatch ERIC is Europe’s first line of response to this emergency, applying and advancing ICT technologies, web networks, interconnecting scientific communities and research centres internationally into its web-based research infrastructure.

Objectives

The Internal Joint and Collaborative Initiative (IJI) was created in order to:

  1. Boost the integration of tools and services into the LifeWatch ERIC web portal
  2. Focus on a major scientific issue in biodiversity and ecosystem research with relevant socio-economic implications in different fields;
  3. Produce new and synthetic knowledge that is needed by institutions, administrations and managers to give solutions to major environmental problems at different scales;
  4. Involve the LifeWatch ERIC National scientific communities, key international research groups and other European research Infrastructures with related interests and running activities; and,
  5. Make this effort an example of the functioning of the LifeWatch ERIC e-Infrastructure through its dissemination and outreach activities.

The topic of non-indigenous and invasive species (NIS) was chosen as the first demonstration case of the functioning of the LifeWatch ERIC e-Infrastructure. This initiative helps addressing some of the main issues on NIS in the field of ecosystem and habitat type vulnerability and in the context of climate change as well as help highlight societal needs and potential solutions to be tested.

ENVRI International Winter School DATA FAIRness

Click here to see the programme.

The Winter School was organised over a two-week period, on average dedicating around 40 hours in total (including preparation). It was structured around daily activities, with scheduled lectures and presentations in the mornings (09-11), followed by associated group and individual work time (11-12).

Target audience:

Since the focus was on supporting end users in how to make the best use of data, understanding the end user perspective was very important to developing good user interfaces and services to interact with data.
The main target groups were the staff at ENVRI data centres, researchers and PhD candidates, with the aim to:

  • present state-of-the-art technologies relevant to FAIRification of services
  • based on real-life use cases, encourage adoption of new technology to enhance data centre functionality
  • enable new knowledge-exchange networks for ENVRI data professionals

For practical reasons, we could only accommodate 30 participants in total. The selection of participants was based on a mix of criteria, including motivation and use case descriptions.

Towards ENVRI Community International Winter School DATA FAIRness

In July-September 2020 we organised a three-day webinar programme, which introduced the main topics of the winter school (the use of FAIR data in ENVRI Community, and for Environmental and Earth sciences research) with theoretical presentations, exercises and discussion. The training materials (slides, presentations, recordings, etc.) are available on the ENVRI-FAIR Training Platform. 

Towards ENVRI Winter School

Towards ENVRI Community International Winter School DATA FAIRness

Webinar Programme July-September 2020

Due to the COVID-19 emergency, our planned summer school, initially scheduled for 10-15 July was postponed to January 2021. The restrictions for travelling to and from Italy, the other safety measures adopted in many countries to contain the virus and the general uncertainty made it impossible for us to confirm the original schedule. The revised website with the updated programme can be found here.

In the meanwhile, we decided to organise a three-day webinar programme, which introduced the main topics of the Winter School (the use of FAIR data in ENVRI Community, and for Environmental and Earth sciences research) with theoretical presentations, exercises and discussion.

Target audience:

The main target group were the ENVRI-FAIR project partners data centre staff, but anyone interested was permitted to attend the webinars.

INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL Data FAIRness in Environmental & Earth Science Infrastructures

In recent years, one of the major challenges in Environmental and Earth Science has been managing and searching larger volumes of data, collected across multiple disciplines. Many different standards, approaches, and tools have been developed to support the phases of the Data Lifecycle (Data Acquisition, Data Curation, Data Publishing, Data Processing and Data Use). In particular, modern semantic technologies provide a promising way to properly describe and interrelate different data sources in ways that reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity and ecosystem resources and researchers.

The course focused on the specific Data FAIRness element of Environmental and Earth sciences. It was built as a five-day summer school where leading scientists addressed this topic from a variety of perspectives.

The aim was to gather the most interesting perspectives of our time.

We offered a cutting edge and high-quality programme, aimed at fostering a rich and lively intellectual exchange.

PROGRAMME

Scientific Community Meeting

About

Plenaries were followed by Working Sessions that aimed to promote greater involvement of the user communities in LifeWatch ERIC, and to gather clear indications of their needs, in terms of services and VRE developments, to facilitate and support their research activities. Participants were also involved in contributing to working session flash presentations. 

A Round Table discussion closed the meeting.