LifeWatch ERIC, the European e-Science Infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, is starting up a free podcast series, called  'A Window on Science'.  We have chosen this easy-access podcast interview format, because reliable information on the environment is of relevance to everybody. The knowledge produced through the LifeWatch ERIC e-Services can inform political decisions and assist businesses in transitioning to a green economy. Have a listen and subscribe to our forthcoming episodes of 'A Window on Science'!

In conversation with Africa Zanella, LifeWatch ERIC International Gender Officer, for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

The first season of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast series 'A Window on Science' outlines the  steps forward that the European e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research has made in the last two years, developing cutting-edge services for researchers. Our CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, opens the series, walking us through terminology that may seem challenging to non-scientific audiences: Research Infrastructures, the Joint Internal Initiative, and virtual servers. The conversation places LifeWatch ERIC clearly in the context of the European Research Area and outlines not only the progress already made, but strategic plans for the next five years - becoming 'the next-generation Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Infrastructure'.  We hope you enjoy!

The LifeWatch ERIC Internal Joint Initiative is the development of innovative online resources and tools designed to further the investigation of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS), and their impact on ecosystem functioning and services. But what are these ecosystem services and functions, and what are invasive species?  Giving us the answers is Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento, who explains all this and more in this easy-to-follow interview, pitched at the non-initiated. The next time someone mentions NIS, you'll know exactly what they mean.  Duration: 15'. Impact on helping us to mitigate further biodiversity loss: high.

LifeWatch ERIC Chief Technology Officer, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, is the guest in the third episode of this introductory season of "A Window on Science".  A Virtual Research Environment is a complex online platform that allows biodiversity and ecosystem researchers to access/ upload data and analyse them to produce visual representations of how species – in this case, Non-indigenous and Invasive Species – are impacting the environment and affecting our own well-being.  An insight into the charismatic energy behind the development of LifeWatch ERIC's e-services and tools.

Season Two of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast series 'A Window on Science' looks at the research cases that validated the development of the virtual research environment - the online tools and services that enable biodiversity and ecosystem research at scales never before achieved. The first episode concerns the Atlantic Blue Crab validation case, the story of Callinectes sapidus, a colourfully aggressive non-indigenous invasive species that over the last 50 years has moved into the Mediterranean Sea big-time, feeding on mussel and oyster farms and displacing local brachyura (decapod crustaceans).    The interview with Giorgio Mancinelli, researcher at the University of Salento, and Antoni Huguet-Vives, front-end developer, explains some of the complexities of marine science and cloud-based ICT workflows in everyday language, accessible to non-scientific audiences. LifeWatch ERIC is the European e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, dedicated to helping us all understand and address the ongoing transformations of the environment because of climate change and anthropogenic pressures.

Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures placed in European coastal waters and retrieved on a regular basis provide the sampling and data collection context to this second episode in season two of the LifeWatch ERIC podcasts. The ARMS research case that helped validate our ground-breaking Virtual Research Environment is presented by Katrina Exter of the Flanders Marine Institute and Matthias Obst from the University of Gothenburg, and concerns hard-bottom communities. To find out exactly what hard-bottom communities are, and why they are important for the resilience of marine ecosystems, grab some headphones and have a listen. Available now in streaming on the LifeWatch ERIC website, Apple, Google, Spotify and Amazon.

Meet Ana Filipa Felipe from the University of Lisbon and Christina Pavloudi from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in this third episode of the second season of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast, 'A Window on Science', focused on Metabarcoding. According to the Living Planet Index, populations of freshwater vertebrate species are declining faster than terrestrial or marine communities. They fell by 81% between 1970 and 2012. That’s a danger signal that researchers at CIBIO-InBIO at the University of Porto, part of LifeWatch Portugal, have been responding to for many years, studying the commercially busy Douro River. Analysis of millions of DNA/RNA sequences in the LifeWatch ERIC cloud computing facilities - called Metabarcoding - identifies taxa within the water samples and then pinpoints, with reference to open-source databases, which species are native and which are invasive. Modelling the data can help environmental managers and politicians combat the invasions and work towards the UN’s sustainability development goals.

The Non-indigenous and Invasive Species in S2, E4 is not an aggressive crustacean or insect, it's a pungent, invasive tree, called Ailanthus altissima, the 'Tree of Heaven', known to horticulturalists as the 'Tree from Hell'.  It excretes toxins to displace other plants, produces millions of seeds a year and extends underground suckers that grow into thick clusters of trees, which makes it difficult to eradicate. Native birds and animals can’t nest or feed anywhere near it, which makes its presence in the Alta Murgia National Park in southern Italy particularly worrying.  Carmela Marangi from the National Research Council of Italy in Bari and Ismael Navas-Delgado, LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core and University of Málaga, speak about harmonising ground observations with satellite imagery provided by the EU Copernicus program and the development of dedicated online tools and services within the LifeWatch ERIC virtual research environment. The Ailanthus workflow can also be applied to other species in other regions, and will assist authorities involved in environmental regulation, among other things, comply with EU regulation 1143/ 2014, whereby European member states have to report on Invasive Alien Species and the steps taken to prevent their spread.

The Biotope validation case is possibly the most complex workflow developed by LifeWatch ERIC within the framework of the Internal Joint Initiative. A biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals, for which 'habitat' is probably the closest equivalent in English. The workflow is the aggregation of high-resolution satellite imagery with statistics across large geographical areas in Europe, to determine what trends can be found in the extent of Non-indigenous and Invasive Species as against the condition and vulnerability of various ecological communities.  As Heliana Teixeira from the University of Aveiro in Portugal, Julien Radoux researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, and Nikos Minadakis CEO of Advance Services in Greece, explain, the Biotope workflow is already available to enable natural capital assessments. It can be scaled, replicated and customised to different bioregions. Meaning, in brief, that it makes possible long-term environmental planning to control and mitigate the impact of invasive alien species across the continent.

The original title of 'Ocean Optimism' does not imply that nothing is wrong with the Ocean, just that progress made in solving marine conservation challenges shows that there are grounds for hope for the future. Increased industrialisation and urbanisation, increased exploitation of resources, and a decreased resilience to larger threats like climate change have certainly led to a dramatic decline in ocean health, as has been well documented. The UN Decade of Ocean Science (2021-2030) and the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration provide a top-down framework for work to prevent, halt and reverse the degradations of marine ecosystems, but there still needs to be a popular, bottom-up, impetus for change if we are going to stop the degradation and restore our 'world ocean conveyor belt' to full health. There are encouraging signs that this is happening. Ocean Optimism is presented by Mike Elliott, Professor of Estuarine & Coastal Sciences at the University of Hull, UK, and Director of International Estuarine & Coastal Specialists Ltd.  A marine biologist, Mike's teaching, research, advisory and consultancy includes estuarine and marine ecology, policy, governance and management. Now is the time, he concludes, to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. What we truly need to achieve transformative change in ocean conservation, and conservation broadly, is nothing less than a social revolution. And are we prepared to make the commitment, to shoulder the costs of the energy transition, to fund protection and restoration on a global scale, and accept major changes in our diet? Mike's interview is a narrative that can inspire others to join in that transformative effort.

Season Three of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast 'A Window on Science' starts with a close-up on WoRMS, the World Register of Marine Species, hosted and curated by the Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ), the Flanders Marine Institute, in Ostend. The interview with Stefanie Dekeyzer, data management specialist at VLIZ, takes us from how the Institute was founded by Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden in 1843, to its current operations, the citizen science events, and the Editorial Board, Steering Committee and the Data Management Teams who ensure that it remains the "authoritative and comprehensive list of all the names of marine organisms that were ever published." VLIZ developed the Aphia database that keeps everything in the one place and provides a global reference point. While WoRMS is the comprehensive list, WRIMS - the World Register of Introduced Marine Species - contains 2,300 introduced species and is an essential part of the LifeWatch ERIC Species Information Backbone. These records link to the Global Invasive Species Database and the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a key organisation in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. Surprisingly, most of the specialists who work on WoRMS and WRiMS are volunteers.

The Critical Zone is the Earth's outer skin, where we all live: the space between the top of the vegetation canopy and the bottom of the surface aquifers, down to the undisturbed rock. It's a very thin layer, where rock meets life, and it is essentially the support system for all terrestrial ecosystems. It's called the Critical Zone because it's critical to ecosystem functioning but it's also critically endangered. Climate change, increases in temperature, pollution, land degradation and invasive alien species are all anthropogenic pressures that are impacting the moisture levels and carbon fluxes, biodiversity, and the integrity of the ecosystem, with devastating effects also on agriculture. The difficulties we face in the Critical Zone and what we are doing to monitor and model critical zone dynamics are addressed by Antonello Provenzale, Director of Institute of Geoscience at CNR, the Italian National Research Council, and Head of the Joint Research Unit of LifeWatch Italy.

Season Three of 'A Window on Science' features interviews with individuals who contribute to Open Science and the study of Invasive Alien Species. In S3, E4, Joris Timmermans from the University of Amsterdam, part of LifeWatch Netherlands, talks about EBVs, Essential Biodiversity Variables and why they are useful.We live in a world of big data, enormous amounts of information collected from numerous satellites that circle the Earth at a distance of 800 kilometres, data which far exceeds the average person's capacity to interpret them. To make clear to policy makers which data, from where, are important, the many parameters of Satellite Remote Sensing have to be simplified into the variables most relevant to a given case of biodiversity research. Integration and harmonisation of these data with other sources of data requires a process of homogenisation based on these most essential descriptors. The LifeWatch ERIC cutting-edge technologies allow us to combine standardised observation over long periods of time to determine which factors are assisting or resisting invasions of alien species.

ENVRI is a network, a community of Environmental Research Infrastructures that collaborate to observe the Earth as a whole. Every single research infrastructure, be it from the atmosphere or marine, solid Earth or ecosystems domain, contributes to this community. We collaborate so we can provide open, FAIR, environmental data, tools and other services that everybody can use for free. ENVRI empowers the advancement of scientific knowledge which is necessary to be able to deal with rapid global changes that affect our planet.  Anca Hienola, Senior Researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, is an expert on atmospheric aerosols and climate change, and also co-Coordinator of the ENVRI Project. Anca approaches this podcast interview from the perspective that observations of the geosphere , hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere have be integrated for us to see the big picture of how complex, interconnected Earth systems operate. Collaborating across disciplines with FAIR data, research infrastructures like LifeWatch ERIC work to understand the intricate puzzle so as to be able to respond to the serious challenges we all face.

In the LifeWatch ERIC on-going catalogue of interesting acronyms, LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It is an active remote sensing technique that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges to the Earth. The light pulses can penetrate through the canopy of a forest and – combined with other information (e.g. intensity, GPS time) recorded by the LiDAR system carried by aircrafts or drones - generate very precise 3D information about the characteristics of Earth's surface. In this Series three, Episode six podcast in our 'A Window on Science' interviews, Yifang Shi, Scientific Developer for Ecological Applications of LiDAR Remote Sensing from the Virtual Laboratory and Innovations Centre in Amsterdam, explains how the LifeWatch ERIC virtual research environment makes this information accessible and useful for any type of end user.Because the VRE is capable of handling enormous amounts of data, it transforms the complex 3D point cloud to 2D raster layers, which are maps that contain detailed information of ecosystem structure. This information about the ecosystem structure helps researchers derive information to describe vegetation height, vegetation cover and vegetation structural complexity, which can be very useful for biodiversity monitoring, sustainable forest management, carbon accounting, and climate change modelling. It is valuable information for a range of ecological applications.

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, Procambarus clarkii, the Louisiana Crayfish.As well as painting an evocative picture of the crayfish presence in waterways in Spain and Italy, Federica includes material from an interview with Elena Tricarico, Research Fellow at the University of Florence.  Elena draws on her 20 years of experience working to understanding the impact and invasion success of aquatic non-native species and how they interact with novel environments and native biota. Together our guests recognise the value of technological aids to research, like the LifeWatch ERIC virtual research environment, acknowledge the contribution of citizen science to monitoring invasive species, and offer advice on how to avoid accidental transmission of bacteria, seeds or pathogens so as to protect our environment. With immense thanks to Federica and Elena, we commend to you this account of the dangerously prolific Louisiana Red Crayfish.

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. The mission of the Biodiversity Portal is to collect, store, standardise, disseminate and make available computing resources to a wide range of stakeholders, so that science-based decisions can be made to improve the quality of conservation in island ecosystems.The hope that professor Borges expresses in this interview is that the work at the AZORESBIOPORTAL can serve as an example to researchers in other archipelagos of how invertebrates can be used to restore habitats, in addition to birds and plants, and that they feel inspired to replicate the biodiversity portal with their own species, photos and data.

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 urban and industrial developments moving seawards. Coastal recession, driven by sea level rise, could well result in the extinction of almost half of the world's sandy beaches by the end of this century, yet beaches are typically prone to weak governance.  Intensive stock-rearing, over-fertilisation of crops, sewage discharges and coastal aquaculture cause eutrophic conditions in which dense growths of plant life deplete the supply of oxygen, leading to higher animal mortality and forming golden and green algal tides. These, together with Harmful Algal Blooms  (HABs, red tides), impact fisheries, causing unemployment and lost income throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. There is a pressing need to increase the monitoring of sandy beaches, combining human observation and interpretation of satellite images. LifeWatch ERIC’s virtual research environment is the ideal instrument to  bring together data from around the world ,to establish holistic management practices with greater attention to adaptive and participatory governance under changing and uncertain climate conditions.

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 aquifers, but human incursions are threatening these vulnerable environments.  Owing to their steepness and relative inaccessibility, Karst landscapes act as natural refuges for species that have disappeared elsewhere as a result of hunting and habitat loss. They also harbour countless unique life forms, including the Human Fish Proteus anguinus, which is an aquatic salamander of the family Proteidae, the only exclusively cave-dwelling chordate species found in Europe. Endemic to the Dinaric Karst and measuring 25 to 30 centimetres in length, the Proteus is a truly precious living gem and the symbol of Slovenian natural heritage.  Professor Tanja Pipan, Principal Research Associate at the ZRC SAZU Karst Research Institute, Nataša Ravbar, Associate Professor at the same Institute and Gregor Aljančič, Head of the Tular Cave Laboratory, discuss their research, their specialised tools and the virtual research environments being developed by LifeWatch Slovenia.