LifeWatch ERIC – Virtual Laboratory and Innovation Center

The facility

LifeWatch ERIC is a research infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystems research. They have offices on multiple locations around Europe. The University of Amsterdam hosts their Virtual Laboratory and Innovation Center, where they offer innovative solutions for building virtual labs. Those virtual labs are used by scientists across Europe for digital experiments and collaborating on biodiversity research. 

LifeWatch ERIC provides virtual research environments that allow for advanced modeling and simulation, and analysing large amounts of data, taking into account all factors that consitute ecosystems: communities of species, soil, weather, etc. 

Research topics 

Biodiversity; climate change; modeling; simulation; data analysis; whole ecosystems research; Digital Twins 

References 

• LifeWatch ERIC Annual report 2023  
• Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): From private notebooks to a collaborative cloud virtual research environment 

Running period 

2017-undetermined 

Equipment 

LifeWatch ERIC offers Virtual Research Environment tools to build Virtual Laboratories and run data workflows in a cloud based environment.   

Data management 

The facility has no data. 

Available datasets 

The facility has no data. 

Conditions for access 

Access is free. LifeWatch ERIC offers the VRE platform as a service. Specific domain scientific support is limited and needs to be arranged by the community. If experiments require large computing and/or storage capacity, users will have to provide this themselves as the capacity in LifeWatch ERIC is limited. The platform can be run on top of that.