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 for research, innovation and educational purposes. It is recognised by the Council of the...

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 System delivers a time and spatially resolved multi-component dataset on atmospheric Essential...

 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 multidisciplinary research in developing vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on objects in...

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 information available online. GBIF manages a network of nodes in 64 countries worldwide with over...

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, that seeks sustainable solutions for complex river-sea systems. The waters coming from a river have a strong...

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 in Finland, while the three thematic centres - atmospheric, ocean and ecosystem - have separate...

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 referred to, is a network of 14 different multi-sensor platforms -some in deep sea water, others in shallow...

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 Chief Executive Officer is the first interview in this fourth Season of 'A Window on Science'...

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 research process itself and the dissemination of results.  For empirical subjects like...

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. An additional Internet of Things payload integrates data gathered from sensors on the ground and...

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 in marine observations, while Pieterjan Verhelst, at the Aquatic Management team at INBO, the...

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 plant species threatened with extinction, drought, the melting of the glaciers, rising sea levels,...

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 practices are often less than sustainable.  Agroecology, the subject of the Season 3, Episode 16 'A...

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 Career Researchers" is a conversation with Cristiano Tamborrino, CNR, the Italian National Research Council in Bari,...

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 surprisingly high species richness in these extreme environments, but also a high number of non-indigenous species,...

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 Mouna Rifi, Assistant Professor at INRAT, the National Institute of Agronomic Research in Tunis, Tunisia;...

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: the bioactive components in the soil, fruit and vegetables. It interfaces with farmers to help restore...

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',  Season 3, Episode 11 of our podcast series, 'A Window on Science'. Marine caves in the Mediterranean are...

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 water. More than 25 percent of the world's population either lives on or obtains its water from karst...

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 ecosystem benefit humans, and human activities affect the ecological side of the equation, often adversely, with...

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, leads the development of the Azorean Biodiversity Portal, a node of Porbiota, or LifeWatch Portugal....

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 Invasive Alien Species,  however, Federica brings us a report on another troublesome invasive crustacean,...