LifeWatch ERIC

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in this fourth podcast on biodiversity issues, entitled "Biodiversity responses, human well-being and climate change" explores how biodiversity loss and climate change, which are both having profound impacts on societies around the world, relate to each other, while focusing on the most important impacts of climate change and global warming on ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and living organisms. The importance of the Convention on Biological Diversity '30x30' target is also analysed while highlighting its potential future developments, e.g. the need of going beyond the traditional definition of a Protected Area, or actions and regulations for a more advanced protection of the natural capital of our Planet. LifeWatch ERIC will do its part to secure biodiversity, building on the web a research infrastructure open worldwide, providing tools and services for early career researchers, policy makers, citizens, in order to deepen our knowledge on how biodiversity is organised, maintained, can be restored or is expected to change, to address all the challenging issues we have at the moment. Species are migrating due to climate change, changing their niches and and certain aspects of their life cycle, impacting food webs and key processes within ecosystems; above all, climate change and global warming are directly affecting individual metabolism and primary productivity and it is therefore expected to cause a loss of biomass in all regions all over the world (except in the Polar regions), affecting all kind of ecosystems and groups of species. Conserving and restoring natural spaces, both on land and in the water, will be essential for limiting carbon emissions and adapting to an already changing climate. In this sense, rewilding could be very important to foster biodiversity recovery and species’ recolonisation of ecosystems. However, rewilding also represents a risk: we could consider to solve the problem of biodiversity loss and act mitigating climate change impacts by rewilding ecosystems in western countries, and at the same time continue to destroy ecosystems all over in the tropical and equatorial latitudes. We realise that climate change is occurring, we “feel the impacts of climate change, because we perceive climate change at a sensory level. Now, we must step forward and perceive that we are as far from sustainable development as we perceive that we are from climate balance.

Paul Bower, left the British Ecological Society in October 2023, after 7 years as Senior Development Manager. In this podcast "The British Ecological Society: a personal view", he speaks freely of the pride and gratitude he feels at having worked with outstanding ecologists in what was the world's first ecological society, founded in 1913, and which boasts an impressive range of professional peer-reviewed journals. BES is not just British, though. It has around 7,500 members, in 119 countries, and although based in London, is a global organisation, with something like 35% of the membership living outside the United Kingdom. In this lead-up to the Annual Meeting in Belfast this December, Paul talks about synergies with LifeWatch ERIC and European Research Infrastructures, and the challenges of communicating science, public outreach and citizen science. He discusses communicating in a post-Covid world and how to make virtual events engaging, and is optimistic that international cooperation will find science-based solutions to the climate challenges that the planet is facing: "Scientists will always, and have for thousands of years, found their way through political turmoil to work together".

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in his third podcast "The need to conserve and manage biodiversity" argues there is no longer much wilderness left in the world. Large areas of our planet have been rebuilt, ecosystems fragmented and forests destroyed in Europe and much of North America, where we have actually rebuilt our own human ecosystem, changing the landscape and importing alien species from elsewhere. This not only affects biodiversity that developed over millions of years, but also ecosystem services that are essential for human life, services that we don't even properly understand. The air we breathe, for example, the oxygen produced through photosynthesis, the benefits of nutrient cycling, tidal waters that protect us against disaster and food production. One great problem is that we are driving to extinction species that we have not yet even classified, in the rainforest canopies that we are rapidly destroying or organisms in the soil that we are losing because of pollution. Beyond the ethical value of biodiversity, we need to avoid further destruction and rebuild and preserve ecosystems, and then better understand the way that some species connect different potentially isolated ecosystems giving stability to the whole area, like eagles in Europe or whales in the ocean. Humans represent most of the biomass of mammals on the planet, and we are eating a lot of resources, consuming 30% of what our planet can produce, and that is putting species at risk of extinction. So it is our responsibility to move urgently towards large scale management of our natural environment and manage our wilderness areas better.

This second interview with Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, concerns "How biodiversity is organised and maintained". The organisation doesn't vary simply according to the species found in a given system, how many are primary producers, how many are consumers or predators, the space available or the resources on hand; it is related to fundamental drivers on energy availability, disturbance intensity and periodicity, the degree of openness and a few others . If species feed on different resources they can co-exist, but the body size related to resource quantity requirements, and the degree of similarity among species can also have a role in setting the coexistence conditions organising biodiversity in ecosystems. Communities inside an ecosystem are always the product of natural selection and thus are the product of progressive co-adaption and co-evolution - it is the interaction between species that makes those species and those communities stable over time -. Human activities disrupt that self management. We disturb the balance in ecosystems by consuming too many resources that could be used by other species, and by polluting the system which decreases the quality of life for other species. Responses to our lack of suitable management approaches are seen more quickly in aquatic environments. We could say that aquatic ecosystems are 'fast reacting' because the producers, like algae, are microscopic and can double their density up to ten times in a single day, while terrestrial systems are 'slow reacting' because producers like plants and trees might live for a hundred years. Having said that, the Mediterranean Sea has been disturbed by humans for over 5,000 years but remains one of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet.

When Izwandy Idris fell in love with polychaete - baitworms or bloodworms - during his PhD, many people wondered why he wanted to specialise in worms, instead of more iconic marine species like whales and dolphins. Now, as Professor at the Institute of Oceanography and Environment at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, he is still a passionate advocate for the many virtues of the humble bloodworm. "They can be very useful and perhaps make you rich as well," he says. Fish farms, the biosynthesis of nanoparticles, and applications in human medicine could transform what at present is a 4D job - Dirty, Dangerous, Damaging and Disturbing - into profitable local employment opportunities. Well-informed environmental management can lead to economic progress. Yes, polychaete are widely used as fish bait, but are also a valuable food stock for the aquaculture industry, because of their high polyunsaturated fat content, which promotes the development of juveniles and increases fish farm yields. Less well known is their ability to synthesise nanoparticles of silver and gold, which have antimicrobial, catalytic, pharmaceutical and electrical conductivity properties. Research show that polychaete have wound-healing capability, like their close relative the leech, and that their blood can be used as a human blood substitute, of great value in organ transplants and blood transfusions. Some Pacific Islanders also eat polychaete and organise feasts during the spawning season. When the world is looking for alternate sources of protein without cutting down forests to raise more livestock, polychaete represent a more sustainable alternative, even if a bit salty.

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, features in this podcast 'What is Biodiversity', the first of our podcast series focused on biodiversity issues. Starting with the foundation concepts of biology - the science of life, or more operationally, whatever concerns life and living organisms - and diversity, in terms of the diversity of the species, populations collected at a single sampling station, taxonomical diversity, genetic diversity, of species inside an ecosystem, and the diversity of species and ecosystems within a landscape or biogeographical region. Prof Basset goes on to discuss the infinitesimal probability of what we take for granted, what we observe in nature, actually having developed at all, through natural selection and evolution, over the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth. A development based on random mutations that made certain individuals fitter and more likely to leave progeny than others, so as to produce stable communities, be they of the species or of the landscape. Which places an enormous responsibility on our shoulders, because human activities are now interfering with and changing something that is not intrinsically stable, but the product of 3 billion years of development against the odds. We humans are destroying biodiversity faster than we can quantify how many species actually make up our biosphere. A complex and fragile biodiversity that we should take more care to protect.

EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is a web of FAIR data and services for science that offers visualisation and analytics, long-term information preservation and monitoring of the uptake of open science practices. It provides researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and re-use data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes. It is recognised by the Council of the European Union as pilot action to deepen the new European Research Area. Ron Dekker, principal consultant at the Technopolis Group in Belgium, who leads the Horizon Europe project EOSC Future, explains in this podcast how it is also this innovation data space is fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data. It operates under well-defined conditions to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest. EOSC Future enables a step change across scientific communities and research infrastructures towards seamless access FAIR data management (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and reliable reuse of research data and other digital objects produced along the research life cycle.

Andreas Petzold from the Department of Global Observation at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research – 8 Troposphere of Forschungszentrum Jülich is a great believer in Research Infrastructures. As well as lecturing at the University of Wuppertal, he coordinates the Research Infrastructure IAGOS and the infrastructure project ENVRI-FAIR. IAGOS, the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System delivers a time and spatially resolved multi-component dataset on atmospheric Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and air pollutants. The data provide information on distribution and long-term changes in the troposphere and lowermost stratosphere, including regular vertical profiles over major cities. IAGOS is unusual as a Research Infrastructure in that the hardware is minimal: the data is collected from 9 commercial passenger aircraft worldwide, each of which makes approximately 500 flights per year. The IAGOS database is used by researchers world-wide to study the changing atmosphere and to validate climate and air quality models. It also feeds into the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and into the European Earth Observation programme Copernicus. ENVRI, on the other hand, is the community of Research Infrastructures in the environmental field in Europe, covering all aspects of Earth system sciences research. Starting in 2011, ENVRI brought together all the existing Research Infrastructures, collected their governance models and management systems for data and background service provision and created a reference model so that new Research Infrastructures don't have to reinvent the wheel. From 2019 to 2023, ENVRI-FAIR helped the Environmental Research Infrastructures make their data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable through harmonised metadata descriptions, and established the technical preconditions for the successful implementation of virtual, federated machine-to-machine interfaces. The integration of services across Research Infrastructures continues to progress through the ENVRI-Hub portal.

Natural Science Collections have been at the heart of addressing fundamental questions in science, innovation and discovery for centuries. They are the foundational layer of information and expertise for taxonomy, for biodiversity and ecosystem research and, increasingly, for climate change data. More recently, natural science collections made important contributions to accelerate and sustain multidisciplinary research in developing vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on objects in the microorganisms and viruses collections. Niels Raes from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands represents the Dutch node of DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, which is taking the integration of those data to new levels, working with more than 170 Natural History Museums, botanical gardens, universities and other natural history institutions across all of Europe, to create a business model that uses the same processes and protocols. The ultimate goal is to build one big, single European distributed natural history system that unifies all the scientific data that is hosted by those individual institutions. That collection, when finalised, will be digital and FAIR - meaning that the data will be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - so that access digital data and metadata on 1.5 billion physical objects will be as easy as logging in to your computer, through the newly developed specification for open Digital Specimens (openDS), an open source digital twin of the physical specimens. Naturally, this information is available all over the world.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments that works closely with data-holding institutions, natural history museums, universities, government agencies, researchers and citizen scientists. As an intergovernmental organisation focused on biodiversity, it gathers data on species occurrences and makes the information available online. GBIF manages a network of nodes in 64 countries worldwide with over 80,000 different datasets and nearly 2.3 billion records. Executive Secretary Joe Miller, the guest of this episode, emphasises the importance of standardising machine-driven data that might come from camera traps or the enormous quantity of environmental data available through DNA sequencing of soils. New data comes every day, and the development of tools and products to meet users' needs never stops. On their website, visitors can select a species on the occurrences page and look around or use the 'literature' feature to explore all the users of GBIF data, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moreover, GBIF hosts hundreds of papers about climate change, agricultural biodiversity, ecology, or evolution, crediting data collectors thanks to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Have a look!

The International Centre for Advanced Science on River-Sea Systems is known as the "Danubius Research Infrastructure". In reality, it's not about the Danube River, although the scientific idea started in the Danube Delta-Black Sea system, as a Romanian initiative. Then it quickly became an international, pan-European initiative to develop a distributed RI, comprising 13 countries, that seeks sustainable solutions for complex river-sea systems. The waters coming from a river have a strong impact on the sea that receives them, so proper management at a basin-scale needs to look at the way in which the waters, including snow melt, tributaries and groundwater, and the activities of humans upstream, impact the coastal waters. Adrian Stanica, Director of the Romanian National Institute for Marine Geology and Geoecology in Budapest, summarises the main problems as water sufficiency, sediments and ecosystem health. The cumulative effects of industrialisation and agriculture, both of which consume water and produce run-off, are being exacerbated by climate change. Energy generation in the form of hydroelectric dams is restricting water flows and blocking essential fish migrations, while heavy shipping adds pollutants and Non-indigenous and Invasive Species. There’s pressure from expanding urbanisation, fisheries that demand ever-increasing yields and – with greater leisure time – more and more tourism. Less water and increased sedimentation threaten natural habitats, with loss of biodiversity – which weaken the ecosystem services and functions. Probably 99 percent of all humans live in hydrographic basins, because water is essential, but we are exhausting the systems that give us life. Listen to this "Danubius Research Infrastructure" podcast to understand some of the complex dilemmas that we all collectively need to find solutions to.

The Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) produces standardised, high-precision and long-term observations and facilitates research to understand the carbon cycle – which is how carbon atoms circulate through Earth’s land, air and ocean. In particular, ICOS reports on fluxes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) itself is located in Finland, while the three thematic centres - atmospheric, ocean and ecosystem - have separate centres throughout Europe. Dario Papale, Professor at Tuscia University, is Director of the Ecosystem Thematic Centre in Viterbo, Italy. In this third episode in Season Four of the 'A Window on Science' podcast, he explains how ICOS is different from other Research Infrastructures in that there is only one data centre for all the components. Even though the thematic centres are more cross-disciplinary than other Research Infrastructures, there is only have one data centre and that is at the Carbon Portal, in the ERIC at the University of Lund. And the quality of that data is the maximum priority. The raw data, collected from extensive networks of sensors on land and on the seas is processed in strict compliance with FAIR principles and made available on request in near real-time on the Carbon Portal, meaning that information on pollution and greenhouse gases is easily findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Collaboration with other Research Infrastructures, including LifeWatch ERIC, ensures that different levels of products, from statistical analysis to maps, are downloadable after 24 hours: you can get today the data of the day before. Now that's Open Science!

The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium that specialises in monitoring and reporting the state of the ocean. That ocean that covers about 70% of the planet's surface, is essential for life on Earth, in regulating the climate and supplying food, but about which we know very little. EMSO ERIC, as it's usually referred to, is a network of 14 different multi-sensor platforms -some in deep sea water, others in shallow water sites, some cabled and others free-standing - that keep an eye on marine ecosystems, monitoring ocean acidification, marine resources exploitation and water quality, and distilling enormous amounts of data into Essential Ocean Variables, EOVs, that are crucial measures in delivering ocean forecasts, early warnings, climate projections and assessments of the ocean's health to industry, to policy-makers and to a broad range of stakeholders. Gabriella Quaranta, the EMSO ERIC Project Management Officer, talks in this 'A Window on Science' podcast about the importance of making this data FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable - and EMSO's close cooperation with other European Research Infrastructures, especially within the Environmental Research Infrastructures network (ENVRI), and EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud. This multidisciplinary approach provides a “whole earth approach”, combining information to understand the complex interaction between the hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere and atmosphere, so as to give advance warning of geohazards, algal blooms, ocean warming, oil spills, and helping to mitigate climate change. In this way, EMSO ERIC contributes actively to the European Blue Growth Strategy and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

A Research Infrastructure is a facility that provides FAIR data, reproducible analytics and communities to its users. Not in order to make research, but in order to help those who are doing research by providing them with the right tools, to help them develop and extend their own projects by bringing together not just new assets, but broader communities too. Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC Chief Executive Officer is the first interview in this fourth Season of 'A Window on Science' podcasts, which focuses on European Environmental Research Infrastructures, whose data are open and free to use for anyone involved in interdisciplinary environmental research. Dr Arvanitidis reflects on the nature of Research Infrastructures and their contribution to major European Union objectives like the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, but also gives a forthright account of what LifeWatch ERIC has achieved in its first six years and the challenges that lie ahead in the next implementation period, 2022 -2026. His messages are of hope, because the environmental Research Infrastructures are, of necessity, complementary and collaborative. Data and services are continuously updated and upgraded so when the funding runs out at the end of smaller project, that work can kept 'alive' and operational, as in an incubation chamber. When the current prototype, with its datasets, web services, workflows and Virtual Research Environments reaches full maturity, the plan is to industrialise the infrastructure, "to make it fully operational, and to make it attractive, not only for the scientists, and the students and academics, but also for the private sector and industry".

Publications have always been used as measures of research outcomes, especially in the academic research, and it is a common assumption that publications are, in fact, the output of research. This is however a simplistic vision of the role of publication in science. It is a vital part of the research cycle, which includes hypothesis formulation, securing future fundings to continue the study, the research process itself and the dissemination of results. For empirical subjects like biodiversity, authors can persuade readers that their results are accurate, verifiable and repeatable because they have been validated through application of the scientific method. But all that has changed. The advent of the Internet and of Open Access has profoundly changed the accessibility of research outputs. Storing scientific data electronically has now widened the range of investigations and the quantity of information available. In Season 3, Episode 20 'Biodiversity Data Journal', Cristina di Muri from the Italian National Research Council, CNR, based at the Università del Salento in Lecce, talks about the innovative role of the Pensoft Biodiversity Data Journal in publishing data papers and service papers. Data papers describe available published datasets, and services papers describe web services available within the Virtual Research Environments that host them. LifeWatch ERIC pays the Pensoft publishing house to manage this Topical Collection, as a community peer-reviewed and open access online journal so that readers can download the articles for free. Researchers are encouraged to move with the times and publish more data papers and services papers.

The Andalusia Agency for Agriculture and Fisheries Development is preparing to launch a 10 kg nanosatellite in October 2023 and the mission will be managed by LifeWatch ERIC. Made possible under the European Union's Smartfood programme, the satellite is equipped with a high-resolution remote sensing optical camera that will monitor invasive species and agricultural crops in the Doñana region. An additional Internet of Things payload integrates data gathered from sensors on the ground and relays timely information to a Mission Control Centre under the watchful eye of Jaime Lobo Dominguez-Roqueta, Satellite and HAPS Operation Manager at Federtech, the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core in Seville. The integrated data will enable regional partners in agroecology to take corrective management action, optimising natural resources use and generating new knowledge of the sustainable management of ecosystems. "Nanosatellite remote sensing in Andalusia" is Season 3, Episode 19 of the 'A Window on Science' podcast series. Jaime "the Wolf" Lobo describes how important it is to be able to task one's own satellite which - because it flies at lower altitudes with a revisit time of around four days - will not duplicate, but complement the European Union Copernicus program. Over time, the nanosatellite will be supported by a constellation of other satellites that will further increase the quantity and quality of information on biodiversity and ecosystems provided to Doñana region.

Acoustic telemetry consists of a tag, a transmitter, implanted in fish, that sends a signal which can be picked up by receiving instruments, fixed hydrophones under water, that listen for these sounds. When a tagged fish is close to a receiver, it gives a time stamp of when that particular fish was passing by, at a certain location. Jan Reubens at VLIZ, the Flanders Marine Institute, specialises in marine observations, while Pieterjan Verhelst, at the Aquatic Management team at INBO, the Research Institute for Nature and Forest in Brussels, monitors freshwater and rivers. Together they present this Season 3, Episode 18 podcast 'Acoustic Telemetry' on the information that they are able to store in the European Tracking Network, part of the LifeWatch ERIC central data system, in a FAIR, easily accessible way. The migration of fish is of particular concern -not only when fish migrate between freshwater and the sea, but fish migration in general including species migrating within sea and within freshwater - especially when water extraction and hydroelectric power plants in rivers, and the presence of off-shore wind farms represent serious obstacles to their life cycles. The population of eels was decimated in the 1980s and no-one really knows what caused the abrupt drop; cod populations have been impacted by over-fishing and climate change; anthropogenic factors like pollution and the introduction of non-native species also play a part. Twaite Shad had been absent from the waters around Belgium for about a hundred years, but somewhere around 2010, with better water management practices, the spawning population returned. Successful tagging of Shad sparked the interest of other researchers around the world. Extra data and telemetry networks added to the database extend the geographical scale of the information, which is then more valuable to management agencies and policy-makers. What we learn from the fish helps us restore their populations and habitats to health.

The Horizon 2020 project "Towards a New EU-LAC partnership in Research Infrastructures” known to everyone involved as just ResInfra, set up bi-regional Open Science collaboration between Europe and Latin American and Caribbean countries to establish how Research Infrastructures can cooperate to address environmental issues, including deforestation, the collateral effects of mining, animal and plant species threatened with extinction, drought, the melting of the glaciers, rising sea levels, amongst others, and to learn from each other. In Season 3, Episode 17 of the 'A Window on Science' podcast - "Europe -Latin American and Caribbean partnerships" - Maite Irazábal Plá, the LifeWatch EU-LAC Fundraising, Networking and Projects Office, emphasises the importance of building long-term relationships with the partner countries of Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia and Uruguay, and thanks the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the FECYT, the Foundation for Science and Technology, for their support. Although the ResInfra project came to an end in February 2023, the scientific and political dialogue will now develop in four pilots with European Infrastructures in the fields of Structural Biology, Cultural heritage, the Transdisciplinary application of computation, and in ecosystems and biodiversity research, this last in partnership with LifeWatch ERIC.

Agriculture has for fed the world for thousands of years and supplied enormous quantities of food to meet the needs of Earth's burgeoning population. But conventional agriculture has also caused a lot of problems, called externalities, such as massive deforestation, water scarcities, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and greenhouse gas emissions. Because of these externalities, agricultural practices are often less than sustainable. Agroecology, the subject of the Season 3, Episode 16 'A Window on Science' podcast, strives to balance productivity with the health of people and the environment. José Manuel Ávila-Castuera, Agroecology Coordinator at the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core in Seville, explains that it is an integrated approach that applies ecological and social concepts and principles to farming in a sustainable way, working with nature and with people. It seeks to optimise the interaction between plants, animals, humans and the environment, taking into consideration social aspects. The LifeWatch ERIC virtual research environment is helping to improve decision-making processes, working with the research community, other Research Infrastructures, with policy makers, with farmers and with consumers to push for and foster an agroecological transition that will contribute to more sustainable agricultural practices. Support for this transition comes from many sides, not least from the European Commission's Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research is what LifeWatch ERIC exists to support, providing online computing facilities to accelerate that research and making available data and tools to produce reliable knowledge that can then be employed by decision-makers to safeguard the planet. But what is it like being a researcher? 'A Window on Science' podcast Season 3, Episode 15 "Early Career Researchers" is a conversation with Cristiano Tamborrino, CNR, the Italian National Research Council in Bari, and Daniel Crespo, the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies and the Department of Biology at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. They speak freely about their work, their prospects and the results they have achieved in their studies, and in doing so present a human face of science. Within their respective domains - terrestrial and freshwater - they both express their satisfaction with working alongside of mathematicians, ICT engineers and geneticists in LifeWatch ERIC. They are proud of their contribution to combatting climate change, pollution, invasive alien species, and loss of biodiversity which all pose threats to human society, and recommend science as a sound career choice.