Organised by ENVRI-FAIR and LifeWatch ERIC, the School has established itself as an unmissable opportunity to learn about FAIRness in the framework of Research Infrastructures. Having gone into depth on data FAIRness and data management during previous editions, in summer 2022 the school focused on The ENVRI-Hub for Scientists: Designing and Developing Services, Tools and Applications.

The school took place over a week, and on top of the time spent with experienced trainers, it also includes optional excursions and social events.

Target audience

The School was mainly aimed at IT architects, Research Infrastructure (RI) service developers and user support staff, and RI staff working on user interaction and community/network building.

Participation

Participation was free, and successful applicants were offered accommodation and lunch each day in the beautiful baroque city of Lecce in Southern Italy, on top of “extracurricular” activities such as restaurant dinners and excursions in the surrounding area on certain days. Travel must be self-funded.

You can find information about all previous editions of the school on our Training & Education page.

As well as the participants, the team of trainers and experts was also international, listed below in alphabetical order:

• Alessandro Spinuso – Data Technology Researcher at The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
• Andreas Petzold – Head of Group Global Observation Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Antoni Huguet-Vives – Front-end architect for the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core team
• Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés – ICT Infrastructure Operations Coordinator at LifeWatch ERIC
• Luca Cervone – Executive Technologist at CREA-AA
• Malcom Atkinson – Professor of e-Science at Edinburgh University
• Nicola Fiore – ICT Coordinator of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre
• Oleg Mirzov – System Architect at ICOS Carbon Portal
• Rita Gomes – Software Engineer at Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Zhiming Zhao – Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam

The School included trainer-led sessions (24 hours), group work and self-study, for a total of 50 learning hours over a two-week period, with lessons taking place on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Participants appreciated the day-on–day-off approach, which allowed them time to process and elaborate the contents of the live sessions and read the provided study materials. On the last day, all the participants had the chance to show and share what that they learned during the School through group work presentations, in which they illustrated their respective projects to the rest of the class and the trainers.

So, the big question is: was the School useful? The statistics and the participants’ feedback speak for themselves: even though the participants’ prior knowledge of the topic varied widely, 80% of them self-evaluated strengthened skill levels in all three categories from the start to the end of the course – designing, developing and publishing FAIR data services. LifeWatch ERIC and the ENVRI Community are very pleased with the outcome of the School and look forward to future editions to continue enhancing the knowledge of FAIR principles, hoping in the meantime that the School can go back to in-person delivery!

These validation cases led to the development of five separate workflows, created through the joint effort of scientists and ICT experts, both from LifeWatch ERIC Common Facilities and Distributed Centres, to accommodate the data and analytical processes generally required by the NIS scientific community. In turn, these workflows have been integrated into Tesseract technical composability layer, the new Virtual Research Environment (VRE) platform being developed by LifeWatch ERIC. Both the innovative advances in technology and the associated scientific reports sparked engaged and enthusiastic discussion over the two days. In fact, the workshop proved to be particularly appreciated by attendees, with 85% rating it as “very good” or “excellent”, as well as the web-services presented also considered “very good” or “excellent” by 78% of participants.

LifeWatch ERIC is at the service of the biodiversity and ecosystem research community, and is constantly seeking to create opportunities for mutual exchange. For this reason, the presentations of the validation cases were complemented by a series of round tables, featuring academics and experts from a wide range of fields. The speakers debated the ecological, economic and social impact of NIS, and the need to work across disciplines, combining social and natural sciences. The final consensus was that greater coordination of data collections is required in order to integrate existing data from different sources, and find ways to enable access to such collections.

Non-indigenous Invasive Species have enormous impacts on ecosystem services, human health and on the economy. This is why LifeWatch ERIC was proud to present the results of the validation cases providing powerful and flexible workflows capable of integrating more data and services than has yet been possible. The workflows will be available in the LifeWatch ERIC Tesseract VRE, which among its many innovative functions, enable the import of data from different sources, their exploration in maps for validation, and the use of standard tools to connect data analytics through its HPC and cloud-related technologies. Tesseract is also built around the unique LifeWatch ERIC tool known as LifeBlock, which uses Blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of all data inputs and full recognition for contributors. The VRE is not only an innovative tool that can be customised to other bioregions, but it will continue to evolve in the light of future feedback from scientists. In the long run, the use of Tesseract will contribute to boosting social awareness about biodiversity and help policymakers concerned about habitat conservation to implement sound science-based decisions.

LifeWatch ERIC would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the superb efforts of all the team members involved, and to thank ENVRI-FAIR Science Cluster for its support during the workshop, as well as all the wonderful speakers and participants who actively contributed to make this 2-day workshop a success and with whom LifeWatch ERIC hopes to continue working in the future.

The recording of the workshop will shortly be made available, in the meantime, you can find the workshop presentations here.

In acknowledgement of the demands of online learning, the Winter School was staged over two weeks, for a total of around 40 hours, including participants’ final presentations. Daily activities consisted of scheduled lectures and presentations in the mornings followed by time for individual and group work. 

With a focus on supporting end users in making the best use of data, developing user-friendly interfaces and providing services to facilitate their interact with data, the curriculum covered:

• state-of-the-art technologies relevant to FAIRification of services
• real-life use cases, to encourage adoption of new technology and enhance data centre functionality
• enabling new knowledge-exchange networks for ENVRI data professionals.

A Data FAIRness Webinar Programme featuring three webinars were jointly organised between ENVRI-FAIR and LifeWatch ERIC from July to September 2020, with a focus on helping end users, particularly ENVRI-FAIR project partners and data centre staff, to make the best use of their data. Registration for the webinars was free and anyone working in environmental and Earth science research was welcome to take part.

Under the heading of ‘Towards the ENVRI Community Winter School’, the online training series debuted on Monday 13 July 2020. The first broadcast was presented by Zhiming Zhao, from the University of Amsterdam, and it aired from 9:30 – 12:00 CEST, providing ‘An introduction to Cloud Computing’. 

The second webinar on ‘Workflows Orchestration and Execution’ followed on Tuesday 14 July, from 10:00 – 12:00, presented by Nicola Fiore and Lucia Vaira, both from LifeWatch ERIC. 

The third webcast was scheduled for 22 September and featured Claudio D’Onofrio and Karolina Pantazatou, both from ICOS ERIC, with ‘An Introduction to Jupyter’.

Organised by LifeWatch ERIC, together with the European ENVRIplus H2020 project and the University of Salento, the Summer School is a professional development intensive which progresses from theoretical learning and discussion and culminates in individual student presentations of how they would apply FAIR management principles to their own work. 

With representatives from Belgium, Estonia, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain, the social interaction and professional networking was also a feature of the course. But at heart, the programme increases levels of knowledge, helps to overcome the fragmented nature of knowledge, and promotes greater complementarity and synergy between disciplines through the development of new common paradigms. 

Managing and analysing enormous quantities of data derived from a variety of sectors and disciplines is, in fact, one of the greatest challenges that environmental and earth sciences have to face in the Information Age. Of the many tools and approaches have been developed to respond to the challenge, the most promising is ‘semantics’, which can be applied to the whole life cycle of data management, from acquisition to utilisation. 

The semantic approach effectively overcomes the existing barriers to finding, accessing, interoperating with, and then re-using and sharing ecosystem and biodiversity data. The result is a marked improvement in our capacity to understand the great environmental questions of our days and then to propose innovative, science-based solutions. 

The teachers on the Summer School were also an international mix: Barbara Magagna (Austria), Clement Jonquet (France), Jose Maria García (Spain), Margareta Hellström (Sweden), and Pierluigi Buttigieg (Germany) brought their collective expertise in support of course convenors Nicola Fiore (Italy) and Zhiming Zhao (Netherlands), while John Graybeal (USA) and Keith Jeffery (UK) contributed remote sessions.
 
The greater understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem research that LifeWatch ERIC promotes is of enormous practical use to the whole of society. It increases our capacities to respond to the environmental emergencies that the world is experiencing, especially factors which already today are the causes of poverty, social inequality, and growing economic uncertainty, not to mention conflicts sparked by competition for basic natural resources, like unpolluted air and water, food and sources of energy. 

Many technologies and innovative case studies were also on display: from remote sensor monitoring of fauna and flora populations, to collecting data on marine life. But beyond gizmos, the working groups ended up agreeing on the need for collaboration, to work across borders and to use metadata to create user stories that everyone can relate to, to create greater common understanding.

Over these days, LifeWatch ERIC moved closer to identifying major gaps in scientific knowledge that need to be addressed, emphasised key societal challenges that biodiversity and ecosystem science are required to address, gathered indications of the services and VRE developments that user communities need, proposed innovative approaches, like the use of blockchain, and identified the need to reinforce collaboration and trust. 

LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, closed proceedings by saying that the processes of life on this planet are complex; that we need complex infrastructures to model and understand that complexity, a task which no country can do alone; and that the scientific community has a responsibility to answer global concerns about climate change. He concluded, “We will use all our arsenal to integrate everything we have and try to give a synthetic knowledge to many more recipients, so we can make a proper response to society. All disciplines need to come together with open communication.”

Presentations given in plenary and working sessions are available online on the conference minisite: