The main goal of the Horizon 2020 GLOBIS-B “GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research”, a project which has originally been promoted by LifeWatch, is to bring together different top expertise related to Biodiversity in a broad and multidisciplinary forum in order to advance the worldwide harmonised implementation of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs). To achieve this goal, internationally acknowledged biodiversity scientists, computer scientists, experts of research infrastructures and legal interoperability have attended four workshops until now.
After the first two workshops focused on ‘Species populations’ EBV class, and the third one focused on ‘Species traits’ EBV class, about fifty chief biodiversity, research infrastructures, ICT and policy specialists have met in Bari from 26 to 28 February 2018, at the occasion of 4th workshop focusing on the ‘Species interactions’ EBV class. Taking into account three main case studies about plant-pollinator, predator-prey, and microbial interactions respectively, basic concepts, current challenges of data and computational tools availability, standards establishment and policy issues have been discussed in order to assess the minimum set of essential measurements and general workflows to monitor species interaction for the estimation of EBV.
“The workshop has been an occasion for LifeWatch-ITA to reinforce its integration in a fully international context and in a particularly interesting field” says Graziano Pesole (LifeWatch-ITA, CNR-IBIOM, Bari, Italy).”These workshops, dedicated to species interactions, are of a key importance for LifeWatch-ITA, in fact one of the four main pillars of its e-Biodiversity Research Institute, the Interactions Thematic Centre, focuses its research activities in this domain” adds Alberto Basset (LifeWatch-ITA, University of Salento, Italy)