A Research Infrastructure is a facility that provides FAIR data, reproducible analytics and communities to its users. Not in order to make research, but in order to help those who are doing research by providing them with the right tools, to help them develop and extend their own projects by bringing together not just new assets, but broader communities too.Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC Chief Executive Officer is the first interview in this fourth Season of 'A Window on Science' podcasts, which focuses on European Environmental Research Infrastructures, whose data are open and free to use for anyone involved in interdisciplinary environmental research. Dr Arvanitidis reflects on the nature of Research Infrastructures and their contribution to major European Union objectives like the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, but also gives a forthright account of what LifeWatch ERIC has achieved in its first six years and the challenges that lie ahead in the next implementation period, 2022 -2026.His messages are of hope, because the environmental Research Infrastructures are, of necessity, complementary and collaborative. Data and services are continuously updated and upgraded so when the funding runs out at the end of smaller project, that work can kept 'alive' and operational, as in an incubation chamber. When the current prototype, with its datasets, web services, workflows and Virtual Research Environments reaches full maturity, the plan is to industrialise the infrastructure, "to make it fully operational, and to make it attractive, not only for the scientists, and the students and academics, but also for the private sector and industry".

The European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium that specialises in monitoring and reporting the state of the ocean. That ocean that covers about 70% of the planet's surface, is essential for life on Earth, in regulating the climate and supplying food, but about which we know very little. EMSO ERIC, as it's usually referred to, is a network of 14 different multi-sensor platforms -some in deep sea water, others in shallow water sites, some cabled and others free-standing - that keep an eye on marine ecosystems, monitoring ocean acidification, marine resources exploitation and water quality, and distilling enormous amounts of data into Essential Ocean Variables, EOVs, that are crucial measures in delivering ocean forecasts, early warnings, climate projections and assessments of the ocean's health to industry, to policy-makers and to a broad range of stakeholders.  Gabriella Quaranta, the EMSO ERIC Project Management Officer, talks in this 'A Window on Science' podcast about the importance of making this data FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable - and EMSO's close cooperation with other European Research Infrastructures, especially within the Environmental Research Infrastructures network (ENVRI), and EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud. This multidisciplinary approach provides a “whole earth approach”, combining information to understand the complex interaction between the hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere and atmosphere, so as to give advance warning of geohazards, algal blooms, ocean warming, oil spills, and helping to mitigate climate change. In this way, EMSO ERIC contributes actively to the European Blue Growth Strategy and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) produces standardised, high-precision and long-term observations and facilitates research to understand the carbon cycle – which is how carbon atoms circulate through Earth’s land, air and ocean. In particular, ICOS reports on fluxes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) itself is located in Finland, while the three thematic centres - atmospheric, ocean and ecosystem - have separate centres throughout Europe.   Dario Papale, Professor at Tuscia University, is Director of the Ecosystem Thematic Centre in Viterbo, Italy. In this third episode in Season Four of the 'A Window on Science' podcast, he explains how ICOS is different from other Research Infrastructures in that there is only one data centre for all the components. Even though the thematic centres are more cross-disciplinary than other Research Infrastructures, there is only have one data centre and that is at the Carbon Portal, in the ERIC at the University of Lund. And the quality of that data is the maximum priority. The raw data, collected from extensive networks of sensors on land and on the seas is processed in strict compliance with FAIR principles and made available on request in near real-time on the Carbon Portal, meaning that information on pollution and greenhouse gases is easily findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Collaboration with other Research Infrastructures, including LifeWatch ERIC, ensures that different levels of products, from statistical analysis to maps, are downloadable after 24 hours: you can get today the data of the day before. Now that's Open Science!

The International Centre for Advanced Science on River-Sea Systems is known as the "Danubius Research Infrastructure".  In reality, it's not about the Danube River, although the scientific idea started in the Danube Delta-Black Sea system, as a Romanian initiative. Then it quickly became an international, pan-European initiative to develop a distributed RI, comprising 13 countries, that seeks sustainable solutions for complex river-sea systems. The waters coming from a river have a strong impact on the sea that receives them, so proper management at a basin-scale needs to look at the way in which the waters, including snow melt, tributaries and groundwater, and the activities of humans upstream, impact the coastal waters.Adrian Stanica, Director of the Romanian National Institute for Marine Geology and Geoecology in Budapest, summarises the main problems as water sufficiency, sediments and ecosystem health. The cumulative effects of industrialisation and agriculture, both of which consume water and produce run-off, are being exacerbated by climate change. Energy generation in the form of hydroelectric dams is restricting water flows and blocking essential fish migrations, while heavy shipping adds pollutants and Non-indigenous and Invasive Species. There’s pressure from expanding urbanisation, fisheries that demand ever-increasing yields and – with greater leisure time – more and more tourism. Less water and increased sedimentation threaten natural habitats, with loss of biodiversity – which weaken the ecosystem services and functions. Probably 99 percent of all humans live in hydrographic basins, because water is essential, but we are exhausting the systems that give us life. Listen to this "Danubius Research Infrastructure" podcast to understand some of the complex dilemmas that we all collectively need to find solutions to.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments that works closely with data-holding institutions, natural history museums, universities, government agencies, researchers and citizen scientists. As an intergovernmental organisation focused on biodiversity, it gathers data on species occurrences and makes the information available online. GBIF manages a network of nodes in 64 countries worldwide with over 80,000 different datasets and nearly 2.3 billion records.Executive Secretary Joe Miller, the guest of this episode, emphasises the importance of standardising machine-driven data that might come from camera traps or the enormous quantity of environmental data available through DNA sequencing of soils. New data comes every day, and the development of tools and products to meet users' needs never stops. On their website, visitors can select a species on the occurrences page and look around or use the 'literature' feature to explore all the users of GBIF data, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moreover, GBIF hosts hundreds of papers about climate change, agricultural biodiversity, ecology, or evolution, crediting data collectors thanks to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Have a look!

Natural Science Collections have been at the heart of addressing fundamental questions in science, innovation and discovery for centuries. They are the foundational layer of information and expertise for taxonomy, for biodiversity and ecosystem research and, increasingly, for climate change data. More recently, natural science collections made important contributions to accelerate and sustain multidisciplinary research in developing vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on objects in the microorganisms and viruses collections. Niels Raes from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands represents the Dutch node of DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, which is taking the integration of those data to new levels, working with more than 170 Natural History Museums, botanical gardens, universities and other natural history institutions across all of Europe, to create a business model that uses the same processes and protocols. The ultimate goal is to build one big, single European distributed natural history system that unifies all the scientific data that is hosted by those individual institutions. That collection, when finalised, will be digital and FAIR - meaning that the data will be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - so that access digital data and metadata on 1.5 billion physical objects will be as easy as logging in to your computer, through the newly developed specification for open Digital Specimens (openDS), an open source digital twin of the physical specimens. Naturally, this information is available all over the world.

Andreas Petzold from the Department of Global Observation at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research – 8 Troposphere of Forschungszentrum Jülich is a great believer in Research Infrastructures. As well as lecturing at the University of Wuppertal, he coordinates the Research Infrastructure IAGOS and the infrastructure project ENVRI-FAIR. IAGOS, the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System delivers a time and spatially resolved multi-component dataset on atmospheric Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and air pollutants. The data provide information on distribution and long-term changes in the troposphere and lowermost stratosphere, including regular vertical profiles over major cities. IAGOS is unusual as a Research Infrastructure in that the hardware is minimal: the data is collected from 9 commercial passenger aircraft worldwide, each of which makes approximately 500 flights per year. The IAGOS database is used by researchers world-wide to study the changing atmosphere and to validate climate and air quality models. It also feeds into the United Nations'  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and into the European Earth Observation programme Copernicus.ENVRI, on the other hand, is the community of Research Infrastructures in the environmental field in Europe, covering all aspects of Earth system sciences research. Starting in 2011, ENVRI brought together all the existing Research Infrastructures, collected their governance models and management systems for data and background service provision and created a reference model so that new Research Infrastructures don't have to reinvent the wheel. From 2019 to 2023, ENVRI-FAIR helped the Environmental Research Infrastructures make their data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable through harmonised metadata descriptions, and established the technical preconditions for the successful implementation of virtual, federated machine-to-machine interfaces. The integration of services across Research Infrastructures continues to progress through the ENVRI-Hub portal.

EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is a web of FAIR data and services for science that offers visualisation and analytics, long-term information preservation and monitoring of the uptake of open science practices. It provides researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and re-use data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes. It is recognised by the Council of the European Union as pilot action to deepen the new European Research Area.Ron Dekker, principal consultant at the Technopolis Group in Belgium, who leads the Horizon Europe project EOSC Future, explains in this podcast how it is also this innovation data space is fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data. It operates under well-defined conditions to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest. EOSC Future enables a step change across scientific communities and research infrastructures towards seamless access FAIR data management (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and reliable reuse of research data and other digital objects produced along the research life cycle.

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.

Vasilis Gerovasileiou, Assistant Professor at the Department of Environment at the Ionian University and Research collaborator at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, the leading partner in LifeWatch Greece, together with Markos Digenis, PhD student also at the Ionian University and HCMR,, describe their work in the well-hidden ecosystems  of 'Marine Caves in the Mediterranean',  Season 3, Episode 11 of our podcast series, 'A Window on Science'.Marine caves in the Mediterranean are protected by the European Union’s Habitats Directive and the Barcelona Convention under the Dark Habitats Action Plan, yet surprisingly little is known about them, compared with other marine habitats. More than 3,000 marine caves have been recorded, mostly on rocky northern Mediterranean coasts. Each one has a unique morphology, and they are all acknowledged as ‘biodiversity reservoirs’ and ‘refuge habitats’ of great conservation value, because they harbour a rich biodiversity, including high numbers of rare, cave exclusive, protected, and deep-sea species. For the first time, Gerovasileiou & Digenis' research records how sessile communities differ in their structure from the entrance zone of these caves (with plenty of light), to the semi-dark and the dark zone, and analyses the motile fauna of these marine caves with a standardised methodology to understand their role in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, these natural laboratories are being affected by climate change and Invasive Alien Species, although lack of historic data series hinder the evaluation of potential impacts. It is likely that water temperature rise - more intense in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, closer to the Suez Canal - may facilitate the establishment of non-indigenous species in new areas.

Vladislav Popov, Professor at the Department of Agroecology at the Agricultural University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, explains in S3, E12 that "Agrobiodiversity" regards the abundance of plants and animals, and their varieties, on farm land. Unlike the perspective of producers and consumers, agrobiodiversity studies concern what is below the ground more than what is visible to the naked eye: the bioactive components in the soil, fruit and vegetables. It interfaces with farmers to help restore organic matter to the soil so they can substitute chemical fertilisers, and help maximise crop yields without compromising biological diversity.The food security of many societies around the world depends on Agrobiodiversity, and the sustainable management of the various biological resources important for food and agriculture is fundamental to policies like the European Union's 'Farm to Fork Strategy'. Studies show the advantages of including a variety of land use practices - zero tillage as against traditional tillage, mulching, planting different varieties and mixed crops - instead of relying on monocultures and pesticides that weaken the land and destroy beneficial insects.