LifeWatch ERIC

LifeWatch ERIC is Europe’s only e-Science infrastructure, offering FAIR-compliant data and analytical services dedicated to research in both biodiversity and ecosystem. Covering a specific and unique niche in the European and international landscape, LifeWatch ERIC’s vision is to become the Research Infrastructure providing one-click access to the world’s content, communities, and services in biodiversity and ecosystem.

Through LifeWatch ERIC, researchers can discover, access, harmonise, standardise, integrate, and analyse data, enabling advanced modelling of biodiversity and ecosystems.

These concepts are multidimensional and even cross-domain: biodiversity is studied across the many levels of biological organisation, as well as scales of observation. Ecosystems are recognised across multiple scales, components and interactions.

To allow the investigation of this complexity, LifeWatch ERIC deploys cutting-edge e-infrastructure technology which federates FAIR-compliant data, reproducible analytical services and mobilised research communities, generating knowledge and innovation.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) provide resources (technological push) for researchers to test their hypotheses and derive evidence-based knowledge (scientific pull), ultimately producing knowledge stemming from multiple disciplines or domains (synthetic knowledge).

The results of this have contributed to advancing various research fields at national, European and global levels, such as macroecology, agroecology, aquatic ecology, invasive taxa, marine ecology, semantic, blockchain, and text mining.

The infrastructure consists of four basic interconnected layers:

• Core (vertical) services, (e.g., AAI, HPC, could services);

• Integration (horizontal) services (e.g., Metadata Catalogue, EcoPortal);

• Ecosystem of analytics, composed of hundreds of web services;

• Services for converting research results into knowledge.

Learn more: www.lifewatch.eu