Collections

This collection is dedicated to assembling significant research outputs that map out the relationships between biodiversity and ecological structure, and their impact on the functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. It highlights the resultant ecosystem services and societal benefits.

The European Union and its Member States are intensely committed to understanding how the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem functions can sustain the provision of ecosystem services, goods, and societal benefits. This comprehension is vital for the sustainable use of these resources and for appreciating the natural and social capital aspects of ecosystems, where stakeholder co-creation plays a crucial role.

Open for submissions from the MARBEFES Project consortium (MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services), this initiative calls for contributions that address significant issues associated with the conceptualization of changes in biodiversity across 12 Broad Belt Transect (BBT) case studies from various regional seas, including the Arctic, Baltic, Northeast Atlantic, and Mediterranean.

These contributions should explore the implications of biodiversity changes for the management and governance of European seas. The BBTs span the entire range of European marine biodiversity, from the frigid Arctic to semi-tropical zones, encompassing dominant habitats and iconic species, and extending from shallow waters to deep-sea environments across diverse socio-economic contexts.

This collection is dedicated to assembling significant research outputs that map out the relationships between biodiversity and ecological structure, and their impact on the functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. It highlights the resultant ecosystem services and societal benefits.

The Europea ...

The European Union's 2030 Biodiversity Strategy aims to place species and ecosystems on the recovery path by 2030, preserving and restoring Europe's natural capital, and positioning Europe at the forefront of global biodiversity conservation efforts. These commitments urgently respond to the decline of species and the deterioration of nature. A key component of this Strategy is the development of a Trans-European Nature Network (TEN-N) that protects ecosystems and their contributions to people against threats from climate change and unsustainable land use. The TEN-N is expected to increase the resilience of natural ecosystems, supported by the existing Natura 2000 Network and other nationally designated protected areas. New designations are expected to contribute to achieving protected land, including inland waters, comprising 30% of the territory, increasing the network's ecological representativeness, and incorporating novel strictly protected and ecological connectivity areas. Implementing the TEN-N faces major challenges in defining criteria and planning tools to maximize the network's representativeness and connectivity at the European level.

The TEN-N should create a functionally connected system, assimilating biodiversity conservation goals with nature-based solutions for societal needs, such as green and blue infrastructure. In the face of global change, the Network should also ensure that species communities can adapt, providing sufficient and connected spaces for nature. Achieving these goals requires innovative planning approaches, integrating models of biodiversity and ecosystem change with conservation prioritization tools and participatory processes. The TEN-N must be based on SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) conservation and management objectives and monitoring methods.

NaturaConnect aims to support the development of the TEN-N through transdisciplinary research. Participatory processes are central to its activities, involving stakeholder engagement at regional, national, and international levels. Predictive biodiversity and ecosystem service models form the backbone for analyzing protected area representativeness and connectivity, taking into account multiple prioritization criteria and the diverse perspectives and needs of nature conservation. NaturaConnect seeks to develop data, analytical tools, and knowledge to support solutions —namely, the blueprint for TEN-N configurations. It also analyses best practices for governance of area-based conservation measures and potential funding mechanisms to provide the European Commission and Member States with a comprehensive set of planning and implementation support tools.

Only publications directly resulting from the NaturaConnect project are accepted in this collection.

The European Union's 2030 Biodiversity Strategy aims to place species and ecosystems on the recovery path by 2030, preserving and restoring Europe's natural capital, and positioning Europe at the forefront of global biodiversity conservation efforts. These commitments urgently respond to the decline ...

LifeWatch ERIC has embarked on its new destination towards upgrading and (co-)constructing its Infrastructure as a response to the needs of its target communities and stakeholders. Through an industrialization process, all independent data, software components, publications and other types of research products contributed by the Member Countries will be consolidated and integrated to enable collaborative development. The Technology Readiness Level of LifeWatch ERIC will be soaring to TRL9. This process is described in its new Strategic Working Plan on its second implementation period (2022-2026). Accordingly, this topical collection of papers includes articles which describe the main outcomes, that is the deliverables of this new Strategic Working Plan. The deliverables published in this topical collection are of not confidential nature and are developed in the form of a standard, structured template.

LifeWatch ERIC has embarked on its new destination towards upgrading and (co-)constructing its Infrastructure as a response to the needs of its target communities and stakeholders. Through an industrialization process, all independent data, software components, publications and other types of resear ...

The Digital Botanical Gardens Initiative (DBGI) ambitions to explore innovative solutions for the collection, management and sharing of digital information acquired on living botanical collections. A particular focus is placed on the large scale characterization of the chemodiversity of living plants collections through mass spectrometric approaches. The acquired data is structured, organized and connected with relevant metadata through semantic web technology. The gathered knowledge can then be exploited to inform ecosystem functioning research and orient biodiversity conservation projects. The DBGI initially aims to take advantage of the readily available living collections of Swiss botanical gardens to establish robust and scalable chemo- and biodiversity digitization workflows. The ultimate goal is to apply these approaches in the field and at the global scale in wild ecosystems. In this sense, the DBGI is a pilot for the larger Earth Metabolome Initiative (EMI) see https://www.earthmetabolome.org/

This topical collection will gather and share the reserach outcomes of the DBGI.

The Digital Botanical Gardens Initiative (DBGI) ambitions to explore innovative solutions for the collection, management and sharing of digital information acquired on living botanical collections. A particular focus is placed on the large scale characterization of the chemodiversity of living plant ...

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites (i.e. aquatic fungi and fungi-like microorganisms) and the relation with their hosts in natural and industrial systems.

Zoosporic parasites cause severe host mortality, the economic impacts of parasitic diseases are notable in microalgae biotech industry, affecting production of food ingredients, biofuels, pharma- and nutraceuticals. But zoosporic parasites also constitute important drivers of natural populations, potentially influencing aquatic food webs and community dynamics, including maintaining and promoting diversity.

Main aim and objective of the Action is to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic Network connecting academia, industries and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites and the relation with their hosts in natural ecosystems and industrial algal biotech production.

The collection includes a range of different outputs and products, including the Grant Proposal (MoU), the Data Management Plan, the Action dissemination products, reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers.

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry an ...

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science practices by providing access to data, tools and services at each stage of and along the entire biodiversity research life cycle (specimens, sequences, taxonomic names, analytics, publications, biodiversity knowledge graph).  

BiCIKL has a special emphasis on biodiversity literature and develops new methods and workflows for semantic publishing and integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, and re-using of sub-article-level data extracted from the published content. 

The main challenge of BiCIKL is to design, develop and implement a FAIR Data Place (FDP), a central tool for search, discovery and management of interlinked FAIR data across different domains. The key final outputs of BiCIKL is the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), a one-stop portal, providing access to the BiCIKL services, tools and workflows, beyond the lifetime of the project.

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science pr ...

This collection hosts outputs from the FP7-funded EU project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). The project proposes an innovative approach in terms of integration of biodiversity information systems from on-ground to remote sensing data, for addressing policy and information needs in a timely and customized way.

This collection hosts outputs from the FP7-funded EU project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). The project proposes an innovative approach in terms of integration of biodiversity information systems from on-ground to remote sensing data, for addressing policy and infor ...

European natural history collections play a critical role in mapping a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend. Since 2004 the EC funded SYNTHESYS programme has been supporting this community, underpinning new ways to access and exploit natural science collections, harmonising collections policy and funding collections-based research for more than 4000 scientists.

SYNTHESYS+ is the fourth iteration of this programme, running from February 2019 to January 2023.  This growing collection of articles highlights major outputs from SYNTHESYS+ over the four year of activity, covering topics such as our new digitisation on-demand service, the construction of a European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) and a new data processing platform (the Specimen Data Refinery), applying artificial intelligence to speed up the digital mobilisation of natural history collections.

European natural history collections play a critical role in mapping a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend. Since 2004 the EC funded SYNTHESYS programme has been supporting this community, underpinning new ways to access and exploit natural science collections ...