Collections

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and metadata. FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) promise to provide the needed framework.

FAIR is about making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable both for humans and machines. FAIR digital objects have shown key capabilities to simplify and scale the use of data across domains, increase trust in data and ease the handling of high volumes of information. Now widespread consensus and collaboration is needed.

The 1st International Conference of FAIR Digital Objects brings together for the first time, key technical, scientific, industry, and science-policy stakeholders at this scale with the aim to boost the development and implementation of FDOs worldwide.

This conference collection explores two of the most urgent themes in constructing the FDO framework: research in structuring the knowledge domain and how to facilitate practical work, and practice in the design and building of FDO-consistent infrastructures.

This collection hosts outcomes from B-GOOD, a Horizon 2020 project funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 817622). B-GOOD is a 5-year funded project (2018-2023) that integrates the knowledge and experience of researchers, beekeepers and a variety of stakeholders, and focuses on the provision of computationally-assisted decision making for sustainable beekeeping. By using a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, researchers within B-GOOD use data from within and around beehives to develop and test innovative tools to monitor colony health, as well as develop more efficient management practices. The collection includes a range of outputs, including reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers.

The BESTMAP RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the new modelling framework the project is developing. The project’s work focuses on supporting EU policy design and monitoring, by addressing the complexity of decisions made by farmers and the wider impact of agricultural policy on natural, social and cultural assets in rural areas of Europe.

This Collection will continue to be developed further as the BESTMAP project continues to promote a sustainable future for the agriculture sector in Europe.

Observations are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased, and lack integration in Europe. EuropaBON aims to bridge this gap by designing an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services. EuropaBON harnesses the power of modelling essential variables to integrate different reporting streams, data sources, and monitoring schemes. These essential variables provide consistent knowledge about multiple dimensions of biodiversity change across space and time. They can then be analyzed and synthesized to support decision-making at different spatial scales, from the sub-national to the European scale, through the production of indicators and scenarios. To develop essential biodiversity and ecosystem variables workflows that are policy relevant, EuropaBON is built around stakeholder engagement and knowledge exchange (WP2). EuropaBON will work with stakeholders to identify user and policy needs for biodiversity monitoring and investigate the feasibility of setting up a center to coordinate monitoring activities across Europe (WP2). Together with stakeholders, EuropaBON will assess current monitoring efforts to identify gaps, data and workflow bottlenecks, and analyse cost-effectiveness of different schemes (WP3). This will be used to co-design improved monitoring schemes using novel technologies to become more representative temporally, spatially and taxonomically, delivering multiple benefits to users and society (WP4). Finally, EuropaBON will demonstrate in a set of showcases how workflows tailored to the Birds Directive, Habitats Directive, Water Framework Directive, Climate and Restoration Policy, and the Bioeconomy Strategy, can be implemented (WP5).

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 main driver of the MONITOOL project is to respond to the European Directive demands for the assessment of chemical status of transitional and coastal waters, allowing the use of passive sampling devices (PSDs) in a regulatory context, enhancing the implementation of the WFD.

MONITOOL PROJECT - New tools for monitoring the chemical status in transitional and coastal waters under the WFD - aims to provide a robust database of dissolved and labile metal concentrations in transitional and coastal waters for adapting existing Environmental Quality Standards (EQS; 0.45 µm filtered) suitable EQS-DGT for passive sampling devices in order to evaluate the chemical status of the waters under the WFD.

During MONITOOL project, co-deployments of DGTs and water spot sampling and subsequent DGT and water metal analysis across the Atlantic region will be addressed to determine suitable EQS-DGTs for metals.

The ReNature RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the sustainable use of biodiversity, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, green infrastructure and ecosystem service assessments across rural-urban gradients, equitable access to the benefits derived from nature in cities and socio-environmental justice, payments for ecosystem services, and designing nature-based solutions. Reports from workshops attended by students, early career researchers and policymakers from all over the world will accumulate further empirical knowledge on the ReNature subjects. This Collection will continue to be developed further as the ReNature project continues to promote open innovation whilst effectively engaging communities in the co-development and exchange of knowledge for nature-based solutions implementation.

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) invites submissions of research outcomes - especially early and brief results - relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in light of the unprecedented health emergency and the scale of its worldwide impact on society, industry and economics.

By means of Open Science, we aim to contribute with real-time findings and data to the efforts of scientific teams, experts and other decision-makers across the globe, in order to minimise the damage and eventually bring the end to the current crisis, and even more importantly, prevent similar situations in the future. Published research ideas and brief results are also expected to bring up crucial discussion, thereby facilitating actions and collaborations in the fight against devastating health emergencies.

Especially encouraged are submissions focused on the long-term effects of COVID-19. Considered are publications across disciplines, including medicine, ethics, politics, economics etc. at a local, regional, national or international scale. Accepted publication types include: Research articles, Research Idea, Case Study, Clinical Case Study, Data Paper, Forum Paper, Methods, Questionnaire, R Package, Software Description, Workshop Report, Project Report, Research Poster, Research Presentation, Short Communication, Single-media Publication (e.g. infographics), Data Review.

We also encourage publication of research ‘bundles’, where conventional papers are published along with raw research outputs (e.g. data, case studies, presentations, etc.), to better contextualise the work and facilitate further contribution by other scientists.