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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 title of S3, E2, 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.

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.