LifeWatch ERIC

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in this fourth podcast on biodiversity issues, entitled "Biodiversity responses, human well-being and climate change" explores how biodiversity loss and climate change, which are both having profound impacts on societies around the world, relate to each other, whi...

Paul Bower, left the British Ecological Society in October 2023, after 7 years as Senior Development Manager. In this podcast "The British Ecological Society: a personal view", he speaks freely of the pride and gratitude he feels at having worked with outstanding ecologists in what was the world's first ecological society, founded in 1913, and which boasts an impressive range of pro...

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in his third podcast "The need to conserve and manage biodiversity" argues there is no longer much wilderness left in the world. Large areas of our planet have been rebuilt, ecosystems fragmented and forests destroyed in Europe and much of North America, where we...

This second interview with Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, concerns "How biodiversity is organised and maintained". The organisation doesn't vary simply according to the species found in a given system, how many are primary producers, how many are consumers or predators, the space av...

When Izwandy Idris fell in love with polychaete - baitworms or bloodworms - during his PhD, many people wondered why he wanted to specialise in worms, instead of more iconic marine species like whales and dolphins. Now, as Professor at the Institute of Oceanography and Environment at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, he is still a passionate advocate for the many virtues of the humble bloodworm....

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, features in this podcast 'What is Biodiversity', the first of our podcast series focused on biodiversity issues. Starting with the foundation concepts of biology - the science of life, or more operationally, whatever concerns life and living organisms - and...

EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is a web of FAIR data and services for science that offers visualisation and analytics, long-term information preservation and monitoring of the uptake of open science practices. It provides researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and re-use data, tools and services...

Andreas Petzold from the Department of Global Observation at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research – 8 Troposphere of Forschungszentrum Jülich is a great believer in Research Infrastructures. As well as lecturing at the University of Wuppertal, he coordinates the Research Infrastructure IAGOS and the infrastructure project ENVRI-FAIR.  IAGOS, the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing S...

 Natural Science Collections have been at the heart of addressing fundamental questions in science, innovation and discovery for centuries. They are the foundational layer of information and expertise for taxonomy, for biodiversity and ecosystem research and, increasingly, for climate change data. More recently, natural science collections made important contributions to accelerate and sustain mul...

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments that works closely with data-holding institutions, natural history museums, universities, government agencies, researchers and citizen scientists. As an intergovernmental organisation focused on biodiversity, it gathers data on species occurrences and makes...

The International Centre for Advanced Science on River-Sea Systems is known as the "Danubius Research Infrastructure".  In reality, it's not about the Danube River, although the scientific idea started in the Danube Delta-Black Sea system, as a Romanian initiative. Then it quickly became an international, pan-European initiative to develop a distributed RI, comprising 13 countries,...

The Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) produces standardised, high-precision and long-term observations and facilitates research to understand the carbon cycle – which is how carbon atoms circulate through Earth’s land, air and ocean. In particular, ICOS reports on fluxes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) itself is located...

The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium that specialises in monitoring and reporting the state of the ocean. That ocean that covers about 70% of the planet's surface, is essential for life on Earth, in regulating the climate and supplying food, but about which we know very little.  EMSO ERIC, as it's usually...

A Research Infrastructure is a facility that provides FAIR data, reproducible analytics and communities to its users. Not in order to make research, but in order to help those who are doing research by providing them with the right tools, to help them develop and extend their own projects by bringing together not just new assets, but broader communities too. Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC Ch...

Publications have always been used as measures of research outcomes, especially in the academic research, and it is a common assumption that publications are, in fact, the output of research. This is however a simplistic vision of the role of publication in science. It is a vital part of the research cycle, which includes hypothesis formulation, securing future fundings to continue the study, the...

The Andalusia Agency for Agriculture and Fisheries Development is preparing to launch a 10 kg nanosatellite in October 2023 and the mission will be managed by LifeWatch ERIC. Made possible under the European Union's Smartfood programme, the satellite is equipped with a high-resolution remote sensing optical camera that will monitor invasive species and agricultural crops in the Doñana region....

Acoustic telemetry consists of a tag, a transmitter, implanted in fish, that sends a signal which can be picked up by receiving instruments, fixed hydrophones under water, that listen for these sounds. When a tagged fish is close to a receiver, it gives a time stamp of when that particular fish was passing by, at a certain location. Jan Reubens at VLIZ, the Flanders Marine Institute, specialises i...

The Horizon 2020 project "Towards a New EU-LAC partnership in Research Infrastructures” known to everyone involved as just ResInfra, set up bi-regional Open Science collaboration between Europe and Latin American and Caribbean countries to establish how Research Infrastructures can cooperate to address environmental issues, including deforestation, the collateral effects of mining, animal and...

Agriculture has for fed the world for thousands of years and supplied enormous quantities of food to meet the needs of Earth's burgeoning population. But conventional agriculture has also caused a lot of problems, called externalities, such as massive deforestation, water scarcities, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and greenhouse gas emissions. Because of these externalities, agricultural...

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research is what LifeWatch ERIC exists to support, providing online computing facilities to accelerate that research and making available data and tools to produce reliable knowledge that can then be employed by decision-makers to safeguard the planet. But what is it like being a researcher?   'A Window on Science' podcast Season 3, Episode 15 "Early Caree...

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, LifeWatch ERIC created this podcast series in which scientists from our eight EU member states talk, two at a time, candidly about their work and experience. These ' Voices of Women @LifeWatch ERIC for International Women's Day' conversations elegantly complement the reflections of our International Gender Officer Africa Zanella on the im...

Priscilla Licandro, from the Integrative Marine Ecology Department, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy and Dessislava Dimitrova, from the Institute of Biology and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, get together in the fourth podcast in the mini-series 'Voices of Women @LifeWatch ERIC for International Women's Day'. They exchange ideas on w...

The centerpiece in the 'Voices of Women @LifeWatch ERIC for International Women's Day' podcasts is this interview with International Gender Officer Africa Zanella, hosted by Chief Communication Officer Sara Montinaro, and published today 8 March 2023 - Happy International Women's Day to all our listeners! As such, this podcast draws on the other four interviews in which scienti...

LifeWatch ERIC has created a podcast miniseries to celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, featuring candid interviews with women working in science, called Voices of Women @LifeWatch ERIC for International Women's Day. The scientists we invited from our eight member states talk openly in pairs about their work and experiences, and provide insights from their varied backgrounds. The resulta...

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, LifeWatch ERIC has created a podcast miniseries that investigates the authentic experiences of women working in science, called Voices of Women @LifeWatch ERIC for International Women's Day. We invited scientists from our eight member states to talk candidly about their work and experience, and interviewed them in pairs, which produced some spontan...