Author: lifewatch

LifeWatch ERIC CEO Christos Arvanitidis has welcomed the release today, 20 May 2020, of the ‘European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030′, a blueprint that sets out targeted actions to preserve and restore European ecosystems in recognition that humanity’s relationship with nature is much in need of repair. 

Recognising that climate change, unprecedented decreases in wild species populations and the recent pandemic are the result of unsustainable human activity, the strategy will dedicate €20 billion to restoring degraded ecosystems, increasing protected forest and wetland areas, and creating green spaces in cities to achieve the climate change mitigation that is needed by 2030.

The strategy will support recovery in a post-pandemic world by restoring biodiversity for the benefit of people, climate and the planet, on the basis that nature not only provides the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, but accounts for over half of global Gross Domestic Product. It is central, in fact, to the European Green Deal for sustainable prosperity.

Specific targets include establishing protected areas for 30 percent of land and sea in Europe; restoring degraded ecosystems, increasing organic farming and biodiversity-rich landscape on agricultural soils, halting and reversing the decline of pollinators, reducing the risk and use of pesticides by 50 percent, restoring at least 25,000 km of EU rivers to a free-flowing state, and planting three billion trees by 2030.

“It is essential to reverse the decline of the biodiversity that is essential for life,” said Dr Arvanitidis. “It is clear that biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and the climate crisis are organically connected and this is where LifeWatch ERIC can play a pivotal role in supplying evidence-based synthetic knowledge and nature-based solutions to societal challenges, not only for decision-makers in government, but also to ordinary citizens. To achieve this goal, LifeWatch ERIC offers facilities, open data, web services for reproducible analytics and a vast network of scientists all over Europe. We all have our part to play in turning this around”

All these points are of a key importance also in economic terms, as biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation have clear economic and social costs cost. More than half of global GDP – about €40 trillion – depends on nature, and its restoration is part of the EU’s recovery plan from the coronavirus pandemic. New opportunities for business and growth will arise in sectors like construction, agriculture and food and drink, which could produce, according to the European Commission’s estimation, up to 500,000 jobs. 

The new biodiversity strategy will make the EU a true leader in addressing the global biodiversity crisis, and in global negotiations at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, in October 2020. Documents:

• Communication: EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 – Bring nature back into our lives

• Factsheet: EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030

• Factsheet: The business case for biodiversity

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.

LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre Director Alberto Basset and CTO Juan Miguel González-Aranda have contributed to a recently-published paper that addresses today’s environmental challenges, entitled “Towards a Comprehensive & Integrated Strategy of the European Marine Research Infrastructures for Ocean Observations”, published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Addressing environmental challenges is crucial for humanity and for life on Earth, and will depend on accurate information about fundamental processes in the geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere, and their interactions. Marine Research Infrastructures (RIs) are key tools for understanding these complexities and interrelationships through multi-, inter-disciplinary approaches, because they constitute a dynamic long-term infrastructure framework, supported by European and national funds, to facilitate research, and provide highly accurate data and services.

Collaboration is essential to provide solutions to complex issues that cannot be solved by one partner alone. Europe has the resources and capacity to make comprehensive ocean observations for the benefit of society, and collaboration between RIs is emphasizing the development of multi-sensor technologies and the adoption of multi-parameter and interoperable methodologies for integrated and sustained marine observations. Click here to download the article.

When the ‘European Research Infrastructures for a smarter future’ conference originally planned for 19-20 March in Zagreb by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, had to be cancelled because of public health concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, a digital conference sprang up to take its place. Held online on Friday 15 May, 2020, the international event attracted representatives of Research Infrastructures and policy makers from all over Europe.

LifeWatch ERIC CEO Christos Arvanitidis featured as the first contributor to the morning panel on ‘Research Infrastructures and the European strategic agendas – Green Deal and Energy Transition’. Research Infrastructures, he argued, are organically linked to the European Green Deal Roadmap objectives, as they are tools for science offering the ideal environment to boost integration, community de-fragmentation, and innovation and growth. This, together with cross-domain integration, is of a key relevance on the road towards cleaner energy, more sustainable industry and mobility, reducing pollution and preserving biodiversity. Disruptive technologies also play a pivotal role in addressing the above goals. LifeWatch ERIC, for instance, offers blockchain technology for linking and managing open access data (LifeBlock) and develops the technical layer for the composability of its web services (LifeWatch ERIC Tesseract) towards reproducible analytics. Both technologies play an instrumental role in advancing science and in breaking current barriers between disciplines.

“Research Infrastructures will be critical in assisting the European Union to deliver on commitments to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and deliver science based and nature based solutions to global challenges” he said. “The challenges we are facing are at the same time scientific, technical, societal, cultural, therefore further progress will depend on breaking through traditional barriers and effecting a change in our culture. Synergies at national and regional levels, with industry and business, will be better able to capitalise on this synthetic knowledge, as has been demonstrated in Andalusia, with the ERDF recources”.

The panel on The Green Deal and Energy Transition, was moderated by Inmaculada Figueroa, Vice Deputy Director General for the Internationalisation of Science and Innovation, Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain and ESFRI Vice-Chair, and also featured interventions from Sverre Quale, Director of ECCSEL ERIC; Tonci Tadic, Head of the Croatian Fusion Unit at the Ruder Boškovič Institute; and Jana Kolar, Executive Director of CERIC-ERIC. Click here for details of the ESFRI White Paper ‘Making Science Happen’.

The conference continued touching other key topics for Research Infrastructures their contribution for Regional Development and in the fight against COVID-19, presenting ESFRI White Paper ‘Making Science Happen – a new ambition for Research Infrastructures in the European Research Area’, leading to the policy panel European Research Infrastructures for a smarter future.

Presentation

Christos Arvanitidis, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Alberto Basset & Peter Van Tienderen, “Opportunities the European Green Deal and Energy Union provide for RIs”