The role and challenges of LifeWatch ERIC in the European Environmental Research Infrastructure landscape.

LifeWatch ERIC provides integrated solutions for current constraints and impediments which negatively affect biodiversity and ecosystem research, such as the pressing need for increasingly diverse, open and FAIR compliant data, advanced models, reproducible analytical services and other research products. It also creates the collaborative and democratic research space in the form of the Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to host the above products.

To this end, LifeWatch ERIC has developed advanced tools and technologies, like MyLifeWatch, the LifeBlock (blockchain-based service) for the integration and traceability of research resources and products; discovery, access and provenance; implementation of FAIR principles.

NaaVRE (Notebook as a Virtual REsearch Environment) and Tesseract are additional novel and innovative technologies to build customizable Virtual Labs in the distributed Cloud infrastructure.

LifeWatch ERIC has played a leading role in the ENVRI community from the first initiatives since 2011. It supported the development of the ENVRI Reference Model describing the entire data management cycle and currently contributes to the ENVRIHubNext project by offering user training and skills as well as stakeholder engagement. Through its partner University of Amsterdam, LifeWatch ERIC contributes to the construction of the ENVRI Knowledge base and advanced search engine. 

In the OSCARS project where several clusters of European (ESFRI) Research Infrastructures collaborate, LifeWatch ERIC represents the ENVRI cluster in building up the Cluster Competence Centers.

The challenges of LifeWatch ERIC are manifold. Although firmly established, the constant need for collaboration with our ENVRI partners is essential to offer holistic and interdisciplinary solutions to environmental research. Long term funding is a constant challenge in this  period of political uncertainty for the science and its impacts on policy and society. New emerging technologies like AI are needed to be implemented to keep up with technological standards. This can only be done in a concerted way with the allies in ENVRI, to support Environmental Science and policy in the best possible way, considering the big societal challenges like for instance climate change, biodiversity loss, food security and health.

We will discuss these challenges, offer possible ways forward and ways to further engage with the ENVRI community and policy makers at the European level on opportunities for sustainable future cooperation.