Life Watch Scientific Community Meeting, Rome, Italy

Pedro Beja has just returned from Rome, Italy. He was invited to give a talk entitled “Next Generation Sequencing: opportunities and challenges of a disruptive technology for biodiversity assessment and monitoring” at the LifeWatch Scientific Community Meeting, that took place from 27-29 May 2019.

LifeWatch ERIC is a European Infrastructure Consortium providing e-Science research facilities to scientists working in Biodiversity organisation and Ecosystem functions and services. The program of this meeting was composed of plenaries talks, and working sessions aiming to promote greater involvement of the user communities in LifeWatch ERIC, and to gather clear indications of their needs, in terms of services and developments, to facilitate and support their research activities. A Round Table discussion closed the meeting.

Participation in this meeting provided ample opportunity to disseminate the work of the ERA Chair, in an important forum that is launching a number of initiatives related to the work of LifeWatch ERIC. In particular, it was discussed the possibility of creating a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) in the scope of Life Watch, to deal with the processing of metabarcoding data. This VRE might be based on the analysis pipeline under development by the ERA Chair Team, in particular Nuno Fonseca (ERA Chair holder) and Mafalda Galhardo, which would be transformed into an online application to be used by everyone everywhere in the world.