LifeWatch ERIC

Dr. Giorgos Chatzigeorgiou and Ioannis Rallis from the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture, at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Crete, are scientific divers who investigate 'Non-indigenous and Invasive Species in Ports and Marinas', despite the challenges of poor visibility, ropes, chains and unpredictable marine traffic.  Their research shows a surprisin...

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most plastic-polluted seas on the planet.  And because of its busy commercial shipping routes, it is adversely affected by the presence of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS). Our S3, E 13 podcast "Invasive Crustaceans 2.0" discusses these invasions from a gastronomic and management point of view. Featuring M...

Vladislav Popov, Professor at the Department of Agroecology at the Agricultural University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, explains in S3, E12 that "Agrobiodiversity" regards the abundance of plants and animals, and their varieties, on farm land. Unlike the perspective of producers and consumers, agrobiodiversity studies concern what is below the ground more than what is visible to the naked eye:...

Vasilis Gerovasileiou, Assistant Professor at the Department of Environment at the Ionian University and Research collaborator at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, the leading partner in LifeWatch Greece, together with Markos Digenis, PhD student also at the Ionian University and HCMR,, describe their work in the well-hidden ecosystems  of 'Marine Caves in the Mediterranean',  Sea...

Season 3, Episode 10 of 'A Window in Science' regards the demanding and sometimes dangerous biodiversity and ecosystem research in the underground Karst caves of Postojna, Slovenia. Karst is a special type of landscape that is formed by the dissolution of soluble rocks, including limestone and dolomite, and Karst regions contain aquifers that are capable of providing large supplies of wa...

The somewhat confronting content of S3, E9, 'Sandy Beaches at Risk' is the result of research by Professor Omar Defeo at the Laboratory of Marine Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, University of Uruguay. More than a third of the world's ice-free ocean coastline is composed of sandy beaches, which function as social-ecological systems in that the quality of services provided by the ecosy...

The Azores are a semitropical archipelago of volcanic islands in the North Atlantic Ocean, about 1,400 kms west of Lisbon and 1,500 kms northwest of Morocco.  The islands have some very impressive fauna and flora, but about 60% of the endemic species are vulnerable, or endangered according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List. Our guest, professor Paulo Borges,...

In a departure from our regular interviews, Series 3, Episode 7 of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast 'A Window in Science' features a guest podcaster, Federica Gerini, who is completing her Masters in Science Communication at SISSA, the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, in Trieste, Italy.  Consistent with our core themes of biodiversity and ecosystem research, Open Science and...

In the LifeWatch ERIC on-going catalogue of interesting acronyms, LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It is an active remote sensing technique that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges to the Earth. The light pulses can penetrate through the canopy of a forest and – combined with other information (e.g. intensity, GPS time) recorded by the LiDAR system carried by ai...

ENVRI is a network, a community of Environmental Research Infrastructures that collaborate to observe the Earth as a whole. Every single research infrastructure, be it from the atmosphere or marine, solid Earth or ecosystems domain, contributes to this community. We collaborate so we can provide open, FAIR, environmental data, tools and other services that everybody can use for free. ENVRI empower...

Season Three of 'A Window on Science' features interviews with individuals who contribute to Open Science and the study of Invasive Alien Species. In S3, E4, Joris Timmermans from the University of Amsterdam, part of LifeWatch Netherlands, talks about EBVs, Essential Biodiversity Variables and why they are useful. We live in a world of big data, enormous amounts of information collected...

The Critical Zone is the Earth's outer skin, where we all live: the space between the top of the vegetation canopy and the bottom of the surface aquifers, down to the undisturbed rock. It's a very thin layer, where rock meets life, and it is essentially the support system for all terrestrial ecosystems. It's called the Critical Zone because it's critical to ecosystem functionin...

Season Three of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast 'A Window on Science' starts with a close-up on WoRMS, the World Register of Marine Species, hosted and curated by the Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ), the Flanders Marine Institute, in Ostend. The interview with Stefanie Dekeyzer, data management specialist at VLIZ, takes us from how the Institute was founded by Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden in...

The original title of 'Ocean Optimism' does not imply that nothing is wrong with the Ocean, just that progress made in solving marine conservation challenges shows that there are grounds for hope for the future. Increased industrialisation and urbanisation, increased exploitation of resources, and a decreased resilience to larger threats like climate change have certainly led to a dramat...

The Biotope validation case is possibly the most complex workflow developed by LifeWatch ERIC within the framework of the Internal Joint Initiative. A biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals, for which 'habitat' is probably the closest equivalent in English. The workflow is the aggregation of high-res...

The Non-indigenous and Invasive Species in S2, E4 is not an aggressive crustacean or insect, it's a pungent, invasive tree, called Ailanthus altissima , the 'Tree of Heaven', known to horticulturalists as the 'Tree from Hell'.  It excretes toxins to displace other plants, produces millions of seeds a year and extends underground suckers that grow into thick clusters of tre...

Meet Ana Filipa Felipe from the University of Lisbon and Christina Pavloudi from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in this third episode of the second season of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast, 'A Window on Science', focused on Metabarcoding.  According to the Living Planet Index, populations of freshwater vertebrate species are declining faster than terrestrial or marine communities. T...

Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures placed in European coastal waters and retrieved on a regular basis provide the sampling and data collection context to this second episode in season two of the LifeWatch ERIC podcasts. The ARMS research case that helped validate our ground-breaking Virtual Research Environment is presented by Katrina Exter of the Flanders Marine Institute and Matthias Obst fro...

Season Two of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast series 'A Window on Science' looks at the research cases that validated the development of the virtual research environment - the online tools and services that enable biodiversity and ecosystem research at scales never before achieved. The first episode concerns the Atlantic Blue Crab validation case, the story of Callinectes sapidus , a colourfu...

LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, is the guest in the third episode of this introductory season of "A Window on Science".  A Virtual Research Environment is a complex online platform that allows biodiversity and ecosystem researchers to access/ upload data and analyse them to produce visual representations of how species – in this case, Non-indigenous...

The LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative is the development of innovative online resources and tools designed to further the investigation of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS), and their impact on ecosystem functioning and services. But what are these ecosystem services and functions, and what are invasive species?  Giving us the answers is Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the U...

The first season of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast series 'A Window on Science' outlines the  steps forward that the European e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research has made in the last two years, developing cutting-edge services for researchers. Our CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, opens the series, walking us through terminology that may seem challenging to non-scientif...

In conversation with Africa Zanella, LifeWatch ERIC International Gender Officer, for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

  LifeWatch ERIC , the European e-Science Infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, is starting up a free podcast series, called  'A Window on Science'.  We have chosen this easy-access podcast interview format, because reliable information on the environment is of relevance to everybody. The knowledge produced through the LifeWatch ERIC e-Services can inform political deci...