Lifewatch is now ERIC

he European Commission today granted the legal status of European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) to the e-Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch). With this measure, the EU provides the facility with many administrative advantages enjoyed by international organisations and therefore helps to successfully implement the infrastructure project.

LifeWatch aims to advance biodiversity and ecosystem research and to provide major contributions to addressing big environmental challenges such as climate change by providing access through a pan-European distributed e-infrastructure to large sets of data, services and tools that enable the creation of virtual laboratories and decision-support applications. Thanks to these virtual research environments, specific issues related to biodiversity and ecosystem research and preservation are addressed through the implementation of integrated models.

LifeWatch ERIC constitutes a new approach by offering to its users:

• a working environment with unlimited computational and cloud capacity;
• transparency of the research process at all stages (from data collection and interoperability to the interpretation of the results);
• and generic applications which allow multidisciplinary research and the development of the "trading zones" between them.

Based in Seville, LifeWatch is the first ERIC infrastructure hosted by Spain. It was established by eight countries: Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain.

LifeWatch ERIC is the 14^th European Research Infrastructure Consortium established and is the fourth ERIC in the environment sciences area after Euro-Argo ERIC (a European infrastructure examining the role of oceans in the global climate system), EMSO ERIC (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory) and ICOS ERIC (Integrated Carbon Observation System).

Italy, through the Ministry of Education and the National Research Council, plays a key role in LifeWatch-ERIC, by hosting the Service Center, one of three common European venues, at the University of Salento, and helping with the Italian Institute for Research on Distributed Biodiversity supported by a large Joint Research Unit (JRU). For our country the participation in LifeWatch was an opportunity to bring together research groups working on computer ecology, biodiversity and ecosystems, belonging to thirty-one national institutions of great importance, within the national node of the infrastructure .

The Institute of Marine Science (CNR-ISMAR) has been an active part of LifeWatch-ERIC from the early stages of the  infrastructure construction. ISMAR researchers contribute to the performance and development of the activities of LifeWatch, as members of the JRU Coordination Committee and participating in the coordination and activities of Thematic Centers of the Distributed Institute on Biodiversity Research

Go to "LifeWatch Italy"

The communication given by the European Commission is available online here.