USEit

Invasive Alien Species (IAS) and climate change require the development of new capacities to protect the natural capital and manage the rapid transformation of natural resources. The USEit (Using Operational Synergies for the Integrated Management of Invasive Alien Species in Italy) project proposes the development of an integrated and shared approach to improve the management of invasive alien species (IAS) issues, both in marine and terrestrial environments. The goal will be pursued through technical and technological advances supported by studies to improve information management and the use of IAS as a potential economic resource.

The contribution of LifeWatch Italy within the UseIt project consists in managing the data collected on invasive alien species following the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and Open Science principles with the use of an ad hoc space on the LifeWatch-ITA Data Portal. The management plan takes into account all phases of the data lifecycle to ensure that the data collected and generated are quality controlled, well documented, archived and preserved, interoperable, and made accessible for use in other projects or research activities.

sRedList

The sRedList platform is being developed by a joint effort of the sRedList working group and LifeWatch Italy. The former being in charge of the development of the server architecture, which includes the scientific design of the platform, the writing of the underlying R code for the analyses and, with the support of LifeWatch Italy, the development of APIs in R Plumber. The latter being in charge of the development of the client architecture, which includes the operational development of the sRedList platform concerning the interactive and computing aspects. The extinction risk of species is globally monitored by the IUCN Red List (RL). Despite the goal to update extinction risk assessments at least every 10 years, over 21000 species (ca. 18% of those assessed) currently have outdated assessments. The resources needed to keep assessments up to date present a clear sustainability challenge.  By bringing together RL practitioners and ecological modellers, we aim to develop an innovative, rapid, and consistent framework for prioritizing RL assessments.

FAIR-IMPACT

The FAIR-IMPACT project will support the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services across scientific communities and across research outputs at a European, national, and institutional level. FAIR-IMPACT will translate and adapt solutions across scientific domains on persistent identifiers, metadata and ontologies, metrics, certification and interoperability aspects via a set of integrated use cases in the social sciences and humanities, photon and neutron sciences, life sciences and agri-food, and environmental sciences. These solutions will enable repository managers, research performing organisations, funders and policy makers to support FAIR data management, and researchers and citizen scientists to produce FAIR data. LifeWatch Italy is involved in the review and analysis of semantic artefact community practices and governance models to establish their role for EOSC. It also contributes to establish guidelines for FAIR semantic artefacts from creation, to sharing and reuse, via repositories and catalogues. The Institute for Terrestrial Ecosystems Research of the National Research Council (CNR-IRET) is involved in the analysis of community practices related to semantic artefacts and in the revision of related governance models. It also contributes to the creation and support of domain/discipline-specific semantic artefact catalogues federated and coordinated within EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

ParAqua

ParAqua aims at compiling and making available all information on the occurrence of zoosporic parasites (i.e., aquatic fungi and fungi-like microorganisms) and their relationship with hosts, elucidate drivers and evaluate impacts of parasitism in natural and man-made aquatic environments. It is therefore necessary to implement new tools for monitoring and prevention of infections, and to create protocols and a Decision Support Tool for detecting and controlling parasites in the microalgae biotech production.

The final goal is to build and integrate a database on zoosporic parasites across Europe and inventories parasite effects on algal hosts in algal biotech and natural systems in order to provide a tool to help researchers and companies to take early data-informed decisions for algae cultures and parasite recognition. LifeWatch Italy contributes to the project coordinating the actions to collect and manage the data provided by the project participants through an interactive web page and on-line catalogue of aquatic zoosporic parasites, their hosts and their occurrence.

ITINERIS

ITINERIS will build the Italian Hub of Research Infrastructures in the environmental scientific domain for the observation and study of environmental processes in the atmosphere, marine domain, terrestrial biosphere, and geosphere, providing access to data and services and supporting the Country to address current and expected environmental challenges. The main goal is to develop cross-disciplinary research in environmental sciences through the use and re-use of existing (or pre-operational) data and services and new observations, to address scientifically and societally relevant issues such as sustainable use of natural resources, implementation of Nature-Based Solutions, Green and Blue Economy, pollution reduction, critical zone and ecosystem management and restoration, carbon cycle, mitigation of the downstream effects of climate and environmental change.
LifeWatch will offer services and support to other Research Infrastructures for the standardization of measurement protocols, data handling, and interoperability, following the FAIRness principles. Furthermore, LifeWatch willdevelop the Virtual Research Environments for data analysis and modelling of future scenarios in ITINERIS’ domains of interest.

LifeWatchPlus

LifeWatch PLUS is a PNO-IR project, designed to optimise the national biodiversity and ecosystem research community’s involvement within LifeWatch-ITA, reinforce the National Distributed Institute on Biodiversity Research, the heart of the Italian node of the infrastructure, and so to increase in both quantitative and qualitative terms the Italian contribution within LifeWatch ERIC.

The Project

LifeWatchPLUS is a National Research Council infrastructure project funded by the National Operational Programme for Research and Innovation (PON-RI) of the Ministry of University and Research (MUR), in partnership with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the University of Salento and the University of Bologna for the period 2019-2022.

 

The strategic objective of LifeWatchPLUS is to reinforce the Data Centre of LifeWatch-ITA and upgrade it to a National Hub for biodiversity and ecosystem data and research products as:

  1. The main access point to the resources of data, apps and eScience services for the management, aggregation, analysis, modelling and visualisation of data; and,
  2. A Virtual Research Centre for cataloguing and making available fully equipped virtual research environments for data-intense experimental studies on biodiversity and ecosystem key scientific challenges at all levels of the ecological hierarchy and scale.

LifeWatchPLUS will offer to the national scientific community an e-Science Hub and Research Centre on biodiversity and ecosystems unique for its characteristics and potentiality, reinforcing its international competitiveness and supporting better-informed conservation and sustainable utilisation policies for the impressive natural capital and resulting ecosystem services that characterise Italy in Europe.

The project has three main objectives:

PIR-01_00028:

  • Reinforce and upgrade the hardware infrastructure of LifeWatch Italy’s Data Centre. This will be reorganized as a distributed interoperable data centre, supplying computational power and storage capacity for the national node, with thematically distributed nodes acting as hubs for databases of national interest (e.g. check lists on geo-spatial distribution and abundancy in Italy of vegetal and animal species, biotic and abiotic databases);
  • Reinforce, upgrade and extend the tools and services available on the LifeWatch Italy and Service Centre web-portals to make available, aggregate, analyse and model within Virtual Research Environments data and big data of different origins and typology, whether they come from physical research infrastructures, observatories and observation systems of biodiversity and ecosystems, or from individual research groups.
  • Reinforce the Citizen Science ICT platform, currently limited to a number of specific target groups. A radically renewed platform will be developed enabling the provision of services and knowledge, offering citizens direct access to multimedia assets and projects in this domain, and creating a civic platform to connect scientific research on biodiversity, functioning, services and ecological status of ecosystems, with citizen science. It will also be possible to address citizens’ requests for more knowledge on local and global issues of great social and economic relevance, such as the tracking of energy and transportation infrastructures, or how the spread of alien and invasive species (e.g. the Xylella bacterium) is threatening various national areas at different levels.

CIR-01_00028:

  • Support the achievement of the LifeWatchPLUS project objectives reinforcing the human capital in a larger activity and temporal framework;
  • Hire 24 additional staff members with different profiles (communication, management, ICT and scientific), 11 for a two-year period and 13 for a three-year period, through research fellowships and grants.

USEit

USEit

Use of operational synergies for the study and integrated management of invasive alien species in Italy

The Project

Biological invasions represent today one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity, with negative impacts on human health and the economy of our country. The USEit project addresses this problem by involving a number of marine and terrestrial institutes of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). Our main goal is to empower the scientific research on invasive species and to transform this challenge into new opportunities and new growth strategies.

Visit the USEit minisite

Project partners

iret
Irbim_completo_A4_colori
CNR_V8-def_dimensioni
Unisalento

USEit is a project funded by the National Research Council of Italy