Planned as part of the escalation of online communications, LifeWatch Polls is a new initiative launched at the beginning of April 2020 by the infrastructure on Twitter to further connect with its scientific community.
The inspiration from the start was to understand the needs of scientists and to engage them in the development of the research infrastructure. Moreover, the initiative was thought of in an unprecedented time of our history, the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many scientists experienced limitations to their normal activity, and have had to adapt and find alternative solutions for their work.
Now reaching its fifth edition, the LifeWatch poll has been relaunching debates on hot topics and trying to understand the implications of the lockdown for ecologists and biologists in their field work, and if and how open access data repositories are used. Every poll is accompanied by a ‘Did You Know’ #DYK page with plenty of useful resources on the topics dealt with.
The #LWpoll on 6th May delved into the scale of biodiversity research, trying to catch a glimpse of which the most investigated domains are. In the spirit of two-way communication, quite apart from the many replies and Retweets, we’d welcome an email to suggest more topics. Previous polls:
- Do you consider viruses to be part of biodiversity? See results here.
- If you cannot do field research, what are your alternatives? See results here.
- Have you ever shared datasets/databases in an open data repository? See results here.
- At what scale are you currently focusing your research? See results here.