LifeWatch portal Marine Virtual Research Environment launched

The LifeWatch project aims to develop a virtual European biodiversity laboratory by 2017. This biodiversity infrastructure will consist of observation stations, databases, web services and modelling tools. Several European countries (Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Sweden, Greece and Belgium) have committed themselves to developing the central and regional LifeWatch components.

The Marine Virtual Research Environment (further abbreviated as Marine VRE) is the newest LifeWatch product. The portal aims to bring together some highly relevant marine resources, data systems, web services, online tools, etc. into one virtual environment. The LifeWatch Marine VRE portal is organized in three interlinked sections: Access, Analyze and Develop. 
  • The Access section describes a range of data bases and data systems offering data on species names, traits, distributions, genes, etc. All resources were developed or are being maintained in the framework of LifeWatch.
  • The Analyze section gives an overview of online tools for data analysis. For each tool it is described which LifeWatch resources and/or web services are used.
  • Within the Develop section it is explained how to build your own marine virtual lab making use of a range of available web services that access and process data. Here information is given about what web services are, where to find the web services, how to access the web services, and how to connect web services into work flows.

The idea of the marine VRE was first raised during the 2nd LifeWatch e-Infrastructure Construction Operational Meeting in Granada in February 2014 and was further refined during the LifeWatch marine technical meeting, in Crete in June 2014. This meeting was attended by representatives of regional LifeWatch projects in Spain, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, as well as the EU funded projects BioVeL, MicroB3, ViBRANT and EMODnet. More than 30 participants, representing 7 countries and 14 institutes, convened to present their latest LifeWatch-related developments, discuss next steps and explore further collaborations.   The outcome of these fruitful discussions is the LifeWatch Marine VRE portal, which can be considered as a first bottom-up development demonstrating potential and capability emulating the LifeWatch objectives. The integration and interaction between the presented components will increase in future versions of the LifeWatch Marine VRE portal. We will be updating the VRE in the framework of upcoming LifeWatch and H2020 VRE developments.

Be amazed with the tools and resources already there. Check out the website and send us your feedback!