Author: lifewatch

From 25 to 27 June 2018, LifeWatch Italy will hold its Annual National Conference in Rome.

The Annual Conference of LifeWatch Italy, open to the national scientific community, aims at presenting the latest developments of the national node of the European infrastructure, welcoming, at the same time, external contributions on case studies and creating new opportunities for interaction and cooperation with the Infrastructure.

More in details, the Scientific Conference will be held on 25 and 26 June 2018 and will be articulated in three plenary and parallel thematic sessions addressing key topics at the heart of LifeWatch Italy activities in the last two years. These will focus on:

1. Data, Metadata & ICT Services.

2. Semantics Resources.

3. Citizen Science, Communication of Science & Education.

The Annual Conference will be closed by an institutional day with a round table, hosted in the fascinating Italian Presidential Estate of Castelporziano. In collaboration with the Secretariat General of the Presidency of the Italian Republic, LifeWatch Italy is gathering the main National stakeholders and relevant Research Infrastructures, to present itself and the opportunity offered for a deeper knowledge and better management of biodiversity and ecosystems, and to discuss how interconnecting the RIs active in the field.

More details and future updates will be available on the Conference website.

The Call for Abstracts is available here.

To send a contribution for the scientific conference, please register and fill in the whole form. You have time until 4 May 2018.

Bridging the gap between freshwater mollusk research and conservation in the Old and New World

Conservation of freshwater mollusks is essential to maintain the important ecosystem functions and services they provide. Nonetheless, they are at risk as evidenced by their rapid and extensive global decline due to multiple causes, mainly of anthropic origin. Conservation strategies to stop this negative trend and maximize current biodiversity are urgently needed but are hampered by the lack of key information. The Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society (FMCS) can be a reference for everyone but, to date, the Society is primarily serving members in the United States and Canada. This recognition prompted the idea of expanding the Society’s role on other continents, starting in Europe.

Conservation of freshwater mollusks is essential to maintain the important ecosystem functions and services they provide. Nonetheless, they are at risk as evidenced by their rapid and extensive global decline due to multiple causes, mainly of anthropic origin. Conservation strategies to stop this negative trend and maximize current biodiversity are urgently needed but are hampered by the lack of key information. The Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society (FMCS) can be a reference for everyone but, to date, the Society is primarily serving members in the United States and Canada. This recognition prompted the idea of expanding the Society’s role on other continents, starting in Europe.

Deadline for early registration: 30 April;  abstract submission: June 30, 2018

https://molluskconservation.org/EVENTS/2018-INTNL/2018_FMCS-INTNLMeet.html

There is no doubt that Environmental Science is undergoing a period of major change, having to tackle the challenge of data collection, in an era driven by data themselves. Large amounts of data. This approach is necessary when we decide to address the study of ecological processes, from the niche level to the macro-ecological one, investigating multiple species in multiple habitats at the same time.

The relationship between native and alien biodiversity and environmental suitability for land-based biological invasions already poses a complex challenge, in marine habitats the scenario get even more complicated due to a greater quantity of animal phyla. The distribution of the species is here a much more complex phenomenon compared to other environments, being able to develop equally in time and 3D space.

With this in mind, a good number of European projects and infrastructures offer great opportunities making available both primary biodiversity and geographical data. Unfortunately, these data often come from different sources, needing to be harmonised, validated and cleaned up to make them effectively interoperable. A challenge successfully tackled by LifeWatch Italy, which has made available on its Data Portal big data and services to investigate the vulnerability of marine habitats to biological invasions. Taxonomic records have been gathered from specific datasets belonging to several research institutions, both public and private. These data have been shared within the context of the Virtual Research Environment Alien Species of LifeWatch Italy.

Overall, 12521 records (5067 planktonic, 7105 benthic, and 349 nektonic) from 93 marine sites have been gathered by the LifeWatch community in Italy. The data validation has been made in the VRE by its data cleaning semi-automatic service (http://www.servicecentrelifewatch.eu/lifewatch-data-validation) available in the LifeWatch Data Portal, and based on the LifeWatch-ITA Global Names Architecture, referring to PESI, WoRMS, and Catalogue of Life. The study led to the publication of a scientific paper entitled “Ecosystem vulnerability to alien and invasive species: a case study on marine habitats along the Italian coast“. The manuscript has is epistemological grounds in the LifeWatch Italy Alien Species Thesaurus, and is based on a glossary developed by the infrastructure researchers, together with its ICT group. It provides the key terminological resources for the development of the information architecture for the online LifeWatch portal and search platform about alien and invasive species.

The results of this macro-ecological approach focus on the importance of performing large-scale studies, since adopting ecosystem approaches to marine invasion management seems especially fruitful.

At the occasion of the next SItE Congress, which will be held in Cagliari from 12 to 14 September 2018, LifeWatch Italy is organising a session on “Data resources and eco-informatics tools for biodiversity“.

LifeWatch Italy is working on developing tools and services to collect, store and share ecological data, to further understand and better tackle environmental issues, facilitating cooperation among different Institutions and Organisations on the large scale.

This session is an opportunity for different insitutions to present the tools and services they are willing to share within the infrastructure, showing to the national scientific community how LifeWatch-ITA can support research groups in carrying on their own activities.

Updates and information will be published on this page.

The eLTER H2020 project offers researchers funded access to nine European long-term ecosystem research sites.

The related TA call is currently open for applications and will close on 11 March 2018.

For full details, see the European LTER website: http://www.lter-europe.net/elter/ta

Friday 15 December 2017, the General Assembly of the Joint Research Unit LifeWatch-Italy (JRU LW-ITA) met in Rome, at the National Research Council headquarters, for the first time since its recent renewal.

Established by nine members in 2010, the JRU LW-ITA counts thirty-one members today, among those the National Research Council (coordinator), the Secretariat General of the Presidency of the Republic, the National Academy of Sciences, about twenty universities, government agencies, research institutes, consortia and associations (please click here to browse all JRU LW-ITA members). Over time, many key actors and stakeholders of the field of biodiversity and ecosystem research have been joining making possible to have today a JRU gathering a rich variety of skills and expertises, from metagenomics to ecology, from collections to mediterranean ecosystems, from ICT to citizen science, making LW-ITA an unique example of cooperation among different disciplines.

“LifeWatch, providing ICT tools and resources for biodiversity and ecosystem research, has a natural vocation to cross discipline boundaries. I am glad to see that the Italian scientific community was ready to take up the challenge joining LW-ITA.” says Alberto Basset, Interim Director of LifeWatch Service Centre and acting Manager of JRU LW-ITA, “This first meeting was focused on the renewal our statutory bodies and the advancement of our national activity plan. New members are enthusiastic to work with the JRU and others have already asked to join the group.”

“LifeWatch, providing ICT tools and resources for biodiversity and ecosystem research, has a natural vocation to cross discipline boundaries. I am glad to see that the Italian scientific community was ready to take up the challenge joining LW-ITA.” says Alberto Basset, Interim Director of LifeWatch Service Centre and acting Manager of JRU LW-ITA, “This first meeting was focused on the renewal our statutory bodies and the advancement of our national activity plan. New members are enthusiastic to work with the JRU and others have already asked to join the group.”

The massive participation of researchers in the First Italian Citizen Science Conference (Rome, November 23-25, 2017) confirmed the great interest raised by the topic and by the prospects of developing the new approach to science it proposes in Italy.

Even though Citizen Science finds applications in many scientific areas, it finds its largest success in environmental monitoring in terms of both amount of collected data and number of participants. In addition, Citizen Science showed its efficacy as a powerful instrument of awareness raising and life-long learning precisely in this context.

The event brought together the Italian researchers committed on these Citizen Science themes also in the perspective of consolidating a National Citizen Science Group, as in the case of several other European countries. Indeed, in order to ‘network’, one needs to have a clear picture of the project’s strengths and weaknesses and share experiences and perspectives.

The Conference confirmed that Citizen Science not only may provide a potentially relevant contribution to research activities, but in addition represents an effective means to disseminate research among citizens so as to build a scientifically conscious citizenship and put science in its rightful position in common culture.

In this respect, Citizen Science is also a potent instrument for social inclusion in the light of the responsible research and innovation actions at the basis of Horizon 2020.

Citizen Science puts forward numerous challenges, also in terms of ICT: data aggregation and integration, inclusion and maintenance processes over time, validation protocols for data usage in research activities, to name a few.

The complete book of abstracts is available on the Conference website: http://www.citizensciencerome2017.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Volume-ABSTRACTS_COMPLETO.pdf

As well as the collection of posters presented: http://www.citizensciencerome2017.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/POSTER-CON-ELENCO.pdf

LifeWatch Italy (LW-ITA) published a paper in Ecological Informatics (Rosati et al., 2017) on PhytoTraits: a thesaurus on phytoplankton functional traits.

As the other thesauri implemented by LW-ITA, PhytoTraits is the result of the interdisciplinary collaboration of experts both from the functional ecology domain and from information and communication technologies. PhytoTraits is the first initiative to deal with the semantics of phytoplankton functional traits, focusing on morpho-functional traits. It reflects the agreement of a scientific expert community to fix semantic properties of approximately 120 traits.

Following semantic web standard technologies, the thesaurus was implemented in Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Providing harmonised concepts with associated unique and resolvable URIs, PhytoTraits has the potential to significantly reduce the barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange in the functional ecology domain.

The paper presents the PhytoTraits thesaurus focusing on the methodology used to implement it, the possible use cases of the established semantic resource, and finally discusses the usefulness of the thesaurus and of its future developments.

The paper presents the PhytoTraits thesaurus focusing on the methodology used to implement it, the possible use cases of the established semantic resource, and finally discusses the usefulness of the thesaurus and of its future developments.

From the classic works on Biogeography to the more recent contributions, several authors have been using new terms to describe endemic traits. During the years, these terms have often been proposed with different, and sometimes ambiguous definitions. Since the importance of endemism in terms of e.g. ecology, conservation and evolutionary biology, LifeWatch Italy decided to develop a dedicated structured vocabulary with the aim to create a first reference attempt in this discipline, offering a new free service to the scientific community.

Once a glossary of existing terms with their definitions has been compiled, we made a selection of definitions in order to propose a unique reference. The Endemisms Thesaurus is a vocabulary constituting a public domain, and developed as a service by the LifeWatch Italy – Collections Thematic Centre.

The Thesaurus currently includes 15 terms, 15 definitions, 12 bibliographic notes, and 12 historical notes; implementation of further themes within Biogeography is under evaluation.

LifeWatch Italy has made of alien species and freshwaters one of the key topics of its research activities within the vulnerability of ecosystems to alien species arrival case study proposed at the European level and involving marine, terrestrial and freshwaters ecosystems. In 2014, a first paper was published on the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine And Freshwater Ecosystems presenting the weak effects of habitat type on the susceptibility to invasive freshwater species. The research work on this topic continues now with a new paper investigating Alien species in Italian freshwater ecosystems: a macroecological assessment of invasion drivers, just published on a Special Issue of Aquatic Invasions.

In this second work, a macroecological approach was proposed to assess the drivers of occurrence of alien species within the whole biota (microorganisms, plants and animals) across several natural freshwater ecosystems and to produce a broad and general assessment of invasion pattern. Alien species were defined accordingly to the related thesaurus developed by LifeWatch Italy, where alien species were identified as those species deliberately, or inadvertently, introduced in Italy by human activities, after the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492.

Moreover, in this study, researchers took advantage of the biodiversity dataset of Italian water bodies recently collated by LifeWatch Italy to simultaneously test three groups of variables (propagule pressure, abiotic and biotic characteristics), selected as putative predictors of invasibility of a site.

Results showed that propagule pressure, expressed as proximity to larger inhabited areas, and differences in the native species richness of the receiving community, had a significant role in determining the number of alien species occurrence. Furthermore, body size influenced the occurrence and the colonisation processes of alien species. Finally, climatic characteristics were relevant in determining the chances of a site to be invaded confirming the role of these abiotic filters in the invasion process.

The present paper allowed researchers to provide useful insights in the invasibility pattern highlighted in different areas of the Italian peninsula, so that the results can be useful to identify areas deserving a more intensive monitoring effort to prevent or mitigate alien species arrival.