LifeWatch ERIC
e-Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research — European Research Infrastructure Consortium
LifeWatch ERIC's vision is to become the Research Infrastructure providing access to the world's biodiversity content, services and communities in one click. Its mission is to accelerate the research efforts of the scientific community by delivering a European state-of-the-art e-Science Research Infrastructure on biodiversity and ecosystems. Its core business is the construction of virtual 'workbenches' with e-services that allow its user communities to analyse patterns and trends in biodiversity in space and time, its drivers and the impacts on ecosystems. LW ERIC provides scientists access to biodiversity and ecosystem data, services and other research products by using and contributing to its advanced infrastructure to derive evidence-based knowledge for scientific and policy purposes.
Infrastructure and User Services
The Infrastructure consists of four basic interconnected layers:
- Core services, (e.g., AAI, HPC, cloud services) ;
- Integration services (e.g., Metadata Catalogue, Ecoportal) ;
- Ecosystem of analytics, composed of hundreds of web services;
- Services for converting research results into knowledge .
The critical layer for supporting users in maintaining scientific and technical leadership is the integration one. It comprises services integrating research resources and products of LW and federating external ones so that the user has a single access point through which they can:
- Discover and access resources;
- Browse and access the Ecoportal, the repository of semantic resources for ecology and related domains;
- Discover and access multiple resources through LifeBlock, (BlockChain), combined with other modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence;
- Carry out scientific tasks through a series of VREs, each including a number of web services properly orchestrated in workflows by applications such as Tesseract and NaaVRE.
The Infrastructure enables researchers to maintain services from their projects to be accessed through LW, once they have been completed (e.g., BESTMAP; GIGESMED). It serves as an incubation chamber for the services which would otherwise go obsolete. In collaboration with the Distributed Centres (DCs), a number of Thematic Services are maintained, with examples on taxonomy, biogeography and habitat mapping. These include a number of heavily used at European and global levels services: World Register of Marine Species; European Ocean Biogeographic Information System (EurOBIS); MarineRegions. The systems they create are considered standards.
Examples/description of the type of research
LifeWatch ERIC (LW) is the only e-Science Infrastructure dedicated to supporting biodiversity and ecosystem research at national, European and global levels.
These concepts are multidimensional: biodiversity is studied across the many levels of the biological organisation (from genes to ecosystems), as well as across scales of observation (geographic, temporal and functional); ecosystems are recognised across multiple scales from local to global, and include a multitude of abiotic, biotic and socio-economic variables, which interact between and among them.
To allow the investigation of this complexity, LW deploys e-infrastructure technology which federates FAIR compliant data, reproducible analytical services and mobilised research communities, and which generates new knowledge and innovation. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) provide the required resources (technological push) to researchers to test their hypotheses and ultimately derive evidence-based knowledge (scientific pull). As the VREs include resources from multiple disciplines or even domains, enable the testing of the same hypothesis with multiple data sources and analytical services. The production of knowledge that comes from evidence produced by those disciplines or domains, which is called synthetic knowledge.
The number of peer-reviewed articles referring to LW has almost doubled in the first two years of the second period (2022-2026) with respect to the entire previous period (2017-2021). The results of this process have contributed to the advancement of various fields in biodiversity and ecosystem research at national, European and even global levels, such as: macroecology, agroecology, aquatic ecology, invasive taxa, and marine ecology. Engineering topics have also been stimulated, such as semantics, blockchain and text mining, with the corresponding services developed by LW to be operational.
How to access the infrastructure ?
LifeWatch ERIC has established a single access point to its resources and services, browsable through a web portal (lifewatch.eu). Its help desk facilitates users to learn how to use what they need. LW currently offers open and free access, without central access programme or dedicated funding. The Authentication and Authorisation Interface (AAI) has been developed in order to be federated into EOSC to allow access to its resources and products, therefore EOSC-ready. A degree of restriction for users outside LW member countries is likely to be introduced, as prospected in the new Business Plan draft.