Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in this fourth podcast on biodiversity issues, entitled "Biodiversity responses, human well-being and climate change" explores how biodiversity loss and climate change, which are both having profound impacts on societies around the world, relate to each other, while focusing on the most important impacts of climate change and global warming on ecosystem functioning, ec...

Paul Bower, left the British Ecological Society in October 2023, after 7 years as Senior Development Manager. In this podcast "The British Ecological Society: a personal view", he speaks freely of the pride and gratitude he feels at having worked with outstanding ecologists in what was the world's first ecological society, founded in 1913, and which boasts an impressive range of professional peer-reviewed journals. BES is not just British, though. It has around 7,500 members, in 119 cou...

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Italy, in his third podcast "The need to conserve and manage biodiversity" argues there is no longer much wilderness left in the world. Large areas of our planet have been rebuilt, ecosystems fragmented and forests destroyed in Europe and much of North America, where we have actually rebuilt our own human ecosystem, changing the landscape and importing alien species from else...

This second interview with Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, concerns "How biodiversity is organised and maintained". The organisation doesn't vary simply according to the species found in a given system, how many are primary producers, how many are consumers or predators, the space available or the resources on hand; it is related to fundamental drivers on energy availability, disturbance inten...

When Izwandy Idris fell in love with polychaete - baitworms or bloodworms - during his PhD, many people wondered why he wanted to specialise in worms, instead of more iconic marine species like whales and dolphins. Now, as Professor at the Institute of Oceanography and Environment at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, he is still a passionate advocate for the many virtues of the humble bloodworm. "They can be very useful and perhaps make you rich as well," he says. Fish farms, the biosynthes...

Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, features in this podcast 'What is Biodiversity', the first of our podcast series focused on biodiversity issues. Starting with the foundation concepts of biology - the science of life, or more operationally, whatever concerns life and living organisms - and diversity, in terms of the diversity of the species, populations collected at a single sampling station, ...

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 Europea...

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 Essenti...

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...

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...