Template Categorie Articoli: Gutemberg

LifeWatch ERIC participated in the second Board Meeting of the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) at the invitation of the Swedish CAFF Chairmanship. The meeting, held on February 3-6, 2020 at the Gällivare Folkets Hus in Sweden, was attended by the LifeWatch ERIC e-infrastructure operation coordinator, Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés. 

CAFF is the biodiversity working group of the Arctic Council, established in 1996 as a high-level governmental forum to address issues faced by the Arctic governments and the indigenous people of the Arctic. LifeWatch ERIC is involved in the CAFF Arctic Migratory Birds Initiative (AMBI).

LifeWatch ERIC supports AMBI in many ways, hosting in its Spanish premises the offices of the Coordinator of the African Eurasian Flyway, which seeks to improve the conservation and management of shorebird sites along their migration paths from the Arctic down to Africa, and supporting AMBI objectives and its engagement within the African continent and in particular in Guinea-Bissau.

As the Board Meeting progressed however, it became clear that Arctic ecosystems are facing challenges that LifeWatch ERIC is already addressing elsewhere, such as Arctic Invasive Alien Species for example, thus opening up further possibilities to collaborate and add value to a wide range of issues.

In this context, when Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés gave a presentation on LifeWatch ERIC’s state-of-art of ICT developments in Data FAIRness and workflows, some still under construction and deployment, and commitments to dealing with environmental hot topics, it was warmly welcomed. 

The last day provided the opportunity to learn first-hand about the application of indigenous knowledge in managing biodiversity and ecosystem services by the Sámi people, also known as Saami or Lapps, who are native to northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsula of Russia.

ASSEMBLE Plus has issued a call to academics and researchers to submit proposals for the Transnational Access programme, which offers sponsorship of successful applicants for up to 30 days to carry out research in their marine biological stations.

ASSEMBLE Plus is a consortium of organisations from 16 countries operating under the umbrella of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC-ERIC) and offers access to over 30 marine biological institutions across Europe, complete with travel and subsistence, under Horizon 2020 funding. The deadline for this seventh call for applications is 24 April 2020.  

The ASSEMBLE Plus Transnational Access programme provides access to ecosystems (including research vessels and diving facilities), biological resources, technology platforms (molecular imaging, structural and chemical analysis), experimental facilities and e-Services (data sets, analysis, computing and storage). The window of access to research infrastructures is between April and September 2020.  

To qualify for access to facilities, platforms, laboratories, travel, accommodation allowances and shipping costs of project material back to the home institution, applicants should be PhDs, postdoc researchers or engineers in teams of up to two, working or studying in recognised institutions in the European Union with an innovative project proposal. 

Transnational means that the main applicant must be based in a county different from that of the selected access provider. For more information, click here for the website. 

Four environmental Research Infrastructures to build a new joint vision for transitional and coastal environments in the future.

Two years after the last appointment in Athens, the 9th European Coastal Lagoons Conference (EUROLAG) was held in Venice, from 20 to 24 January 2020. Hosted by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the Italian National Research Council, the Consortium for Lagoon Research (CORILA) and the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari jointly organised this 2020 edition with a focus on science, research and management issues related to lagoons and transitional areas. 

The EUROLAG conference marked a very important step not only on the specific coastal lagoon scientific and managerial issues approached in the five days, but it also distinguished itself by putting in the spotlight European research infrastructures, their potential and capacity to tackle big societal challenges, and connecting and supporting scientists in their work. 

The conference opened every day with a keynote talk given by one of the four research infrastructures involved: LifeWatch-ERIC, eLTER, Danubius-RI and EMBRC-ERIC. These sponsors combined their efforts and pooled their strengths to chart a path towards how environmental research infrastructures can collaborate in transitional and coastal environments in the future, avoiding the duplication of tasks, and identifying areas for more intense cooperation and engagement with stakeholders. 

More information on the congress, its programme and contributed sessions are available on https://www.eurolag9.it/.

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Season’s Greetings and a Sustainable New Year from LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy.

The 25th UN Climate Change Conference, originally planned for Chile, is taking place in Madrid, Spain, 2-13 December, 2019.  LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technical Officer, Juan Miguel González-Aranda and Francisco Hernández, Coordinator of LifeWatch Belgium, presented on Tuesday 10 December to the Round Table COP25: Opportunities & Challenges and the 2030 Agenda.

The event, co-organized by the Chilean and Spanish ambassadors to Brussels, Patricio Torres and Beatriz Larrotcha Palma, was supported by LifeWatch Belgium, LifeWatch Spain and LifeWatch ERIC, and hosted in the Instituto Cervantes, Brussels, by its Director, Ana Vásquez. The keynote address was given by Barbara Pesce-Monteiro, UNDP Office, Belgium, the UN Secretary General’s representative to the UN and Belgium. 

The panel discussion moved from the vision of climate diplomacy to its implementation, covering experiences on mitigation and adaptation to climate change in line with the 2030 agenda. As the pre-eminent infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, combining the scientific community and national institutions, it is fundamental for LifeWatch ERIC to be part of these international strategic discussions on climate change.

The Dirk Bouts Building in the Flemish Administrative Centre (VAC) in Leuven, Belgium, was the scene for the 5th LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly, from 11 to 12 December 2019, chaired by Geert Verreet. Composed of the representatives from all full Member States and observers, the purpose of General Assembly Meetings, the highest governing body of LifeWatch ERIC, is to set the overall direction and to supervise the development and operation of LifeWatch ERIC. 

At the heart of this 5th General Assembly lies the prototype of the LifeWatch ERIC Platform, an integrated initiative of LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities presented by the CTO, Dr Juan Miguel González-Aranda. Thanks to its application layers and user-friendly interfaces, the prototype will enable the integration of all the resources, including web services developed by National Nodes over the years, as well as those resulting from Common Facilities and Joint Initiatives, like the recent investigation undertaken by the infrastructure members on the current and future challenges of NIS in Europe, into Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The prototype was adopted by the General Assembly, officially marking the beginning of the deployment and operational phase, with its implementation expected to continue until the end of next year.

With many other important issues on the agenda, this rich two-day meeting moved from a review of LifeWatch ERIC activities in 2019 to forward planning for 2020 and delivering general frameworks for implementation. Among these, the Assembly approved the general framework for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to be used as the basis for a roll-out to national nodes in the course of the year, and an engagement policy to reinforce our dialogue with – and capacity to reach out to – external stakeholders. By finalising the rules and procedures for subsidiary bodies, and having established the selection committee to complete the recruitment of one of the most strategic positions, the Chief Financial Officer, LifeWatch ERIC will be in good shape to hit the ground running in 2020.

The LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative was launched in October 2019 to design and construct a Virtual Research Environment capable of processing and modelling available data on one of the planet’s most burning biodiversity issues, the proliferation of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS), in order to help mitigate their impacts. 

Development of a new Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is essential to further integrate the tools and services available in the LifeWatch ERIC web portal. The process will allow stakeholders greater ability to develop their research activities within the e-Science Infrastructure, whilst also clearly demonstrating the added value that LifeWatch ERIC’s advanced technologies can bring not only to the biodiversity and ecosystem scientific community, but to policy-making and human wellbeing around the globe. 

The concept paper and workflow-timeline developed at the first Dahlem-type workshop in Seville, Spain, 14-18 October, formed the basis of this second Dahlem-type Workshop, organised in Rome, Italy, from 2-6 December, this time coordinated by the LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda. This second Dahlem-type workshop delivered the first prototype of the new LifeWatch ERIC Non-indigenous and Invasive Species Virtual Research Environment. The collaborative construction and deployment approach and the intense interaction between ICT and NIS experts made it possible to achieve definition of the requirements and needs of the scientific community and of the main architecture layers (application, e-Services composition, e-infrastructure integration, and resources) that underpin the VRE. 

The 3^rd Policy Workshop, the 4^th WG meeting of the EU-LAC Working Group on Research Infrastructures in San José, Costa Rica, 27-28 November 2019, was dedicated to the Governance of Research Infrastructures under the perspective of scientific collaboration between Europe and Latin American and Caribbean countries.

LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technical Officer and former Chair of ERIC Forum, Dr. Juan Miguel González-Aranda, explored the theme of how effective governance models and management practices can support the internationalisation of RIs and emphasised the importance of working together to establish methodologies that boost bi-regional cooperation.

Hosted in the National Centre for High Technology (CeNAT) and organized by Federico Torres R&D Director at Ministry of Science, Technology & Telecommunications of Costa Rica, the workshop was opened by Adam Tyson, Head of Unit Research and Industrial Infrastructures, DG Research and Innovation, of the European Commission, and Fernando Amestoy, Chair of the Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group on Research Infrastructures, Director of the Institute Polo Tecnológico de Pando, Uruguay.

 “It’s always inspiring to be involved in these two-way exchanges with Latin America and the Caribbean through close cooperation in the context of biodiversity and ecosystem research and sustainable management topics, in a climate change scenario where researchers, decision makers and citizen scientists come together to address this global societal challenge… and we Research Infrastructures in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem research have much to share – all together, we all benefit,” said Juan Miguel González-Aranda.

LifeWatch ERIC has been involved in this collaboration since the first meeting of the EU-Latin America and Caribbean Working Group on Research Infrastructures organised by the Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) Joint Initiative on Research and Innovation (JIRI), held in Brussels, Belgium, on 14^th March 2017. At that meeting, LifeWatch ERIC was ranked 1st position of interest among the rest of Research Infrastructures. 

Subsequently, representatives from LAC came to the LifeWatch ERIC Headquarters at Doñana Natural Park and Seville, Spain, on 25-27 June 2019, in an inter-regional gathering organized by LifeWatch ERIC and promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the European Commission.

At the same time, LifeWatch ERIC is also partner in the recently approved H2020-INFRA SSUP-RES INFRA proposal, as a model of a distributed e-Infrastructure to consolidate active collaboration of existing EU-LAC Communities of Practice.

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was launched in 2010, with the vision of enhancing knowledge on research and innovation activities, projects, results and funding opportunities to strategically deepen the social, political and economic links between the two regions. It comprises 33 countries, and represents approximately 600 million people.