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, ecosystem services, and living organisms. The importance of the Convention on Biological Diversity '30x30' target is also analysed while highlighting its potential future developments, e.g. the need of going beyond the traditional definition of a Protected Area, or actions and regulations for a more advanced protection of the natural capital of our Planet. LifeWatch ERIC will do its part to secure biodiversity, building on the web a research infrastructure open worldwide, providing tools and services for early career researchers, policy makers, citizens, in order to deepen our knowledge on how biodiversity is organised, maintained, can be restored or is expected to change, to address all the challenging issues we have at the moment.

Species are migrating due to climate change, changing their niches and and certain aspects of their life cycle, impacting food webs and key processes within ecosystems; above all, climate change and global warming are directly affecting individual metabolism and primary productivity and it is therefore expected to cause a loss of biomass in all regions all over the world (except in the Polar regions), affecting all kind of ecosystems and groups of species. Conserving and restoring natural spaces, both on land and in the water, will be essential for limiting carbon emissions and adapting to an already changing climate. In this sense, rewilding could be very important to foster biodiversity recovery and species’ recolonisation of ecosystems. However, rewilding also represents a risk: we could consider to solve the problem of biodiversity loss and act mitigating climate change impacts by rewilding ecosystems in western countries, and at the same time continue to destroy ecosystems all over in the tropical and equatorial latitudes.
We realise that climate change is occurring, we “feel the impacts of climate change, because we perceive climate change at a sensory level. Now, we must step forward and perceive that we are as far from sustainable development as we perceive that we are from climate balance.

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 countries, and  although based in London, is a global organisation, with something like 35% of the membership living outside the United Kingdom. In this lead-up to the Annual Meeting in Belfast this December, Paul talks about synergies with LifeWatch ERIC and European Research Infrastructures, and the challenges of  communicating science, public outreach and citizen science. He discusses communicating in a post-Covid world and how to make virtual events engaging, and is optimistic that international cooperation will find science-based solutions to the climate challenges that the planet is facing: "Scientists will always, and have for thousands of years, found their way through political turmoil to work together".   

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 elsewhere. This not only affects biodiversity that developed over millions of years, but also ecosystem services that are essential for human life, services that we don't even properly understand. The air we breathe, for example, the oxygen produced through photosynthesis, the benefits of nutrient cycling, tidal waters that protect us against disaster and food production.

 One great problem is that we are driving to extinction species that we have not yet even classified, in the rainforest canopies that we are rapidly destroying or organisms in the soil that we are losing because of pollution. Beyond the ethical value of biodiversity, we need to avoid further destruction and rebuild and preserve ecosystems, and then  better understand the way that some species connect different potentially isolated ecosystems giving stability to the whole area, like eagles in Europe or whales in the ocean. Humans represent most of the biomass of mammals on the planet, and we are eating a lot of resources, consuming 30% of what our planet can produce, and that is putting species at risk of extinction. So it is our responsibility to move urgently towards large scale management of our natural environment and manage our wilderness areas better.

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 intensity and periodicity, the degree of openness and a few others . If species feed on different resources they can co-exist, but the body size related to resource quantity requirements, and the degree of similarity among species can also have a role in setting the coexistence conditions organising biodiversity in ecosystems. Communities inside an ecosystem are always the product of natural selection and thus are the product of progressive co-adaption and co-evolution - it is the interaction between species that makes those species and those communities stable over time -. 

Human activities disrupt that self management. We disturb the balance in ecosystems by consuming too many resources that could be used by other species, and by polluting the system which decreases the quality of life for other species. Responses to our lack of suitable management approaches are seen more quickly in aquatic environments. We could say that aquatic ecosystems are 'fast reacting' because the producers, like algae, are microscopic and can double their density up to ten times in a single day, while terrestrial systems are 'slow reacting' because producers like plants and trees might live for a hundred years. Having said that, the Mediterranean Sea has been disturbed by humans for over 5,000 years but remains one of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet. 

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 biosynthesis of nanoparticles, and applications in human medicine could transform what at present is a 4D job - Dirty, Dangerous, Damaging and Disturbing - into profitable local employment opportunities. Well-informed environmental management can lead to economic progress.

Yes, polychaete are widely used as fish bait, but are also a valuable food stock for the aquaculture industry, because of their high polyunsaturated fat content, which promotes the development of juveniles and increases fish farm yields. Less well known is their ability to synthesise nanoparticles of silver and gold, which have antimicrobial, catalytic, pharmaceutical and electrical conductivity properties. Research show that polychaete have wound-healing capability, like their close relative the leech, and that their blood can be used as a human blood substitute, of great value in organ transplants and blood transfusions. Some Pacific Islanders also eat polychaete and organise feasts during the spawning season. When the world is looking for alternate sources of protein without cutting down forests to raise more livestock, polychaete represent a more sustainable alternative, even if a bit salty.

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, taxonomical diversity, genetic diversity, of species inside an ecosystem, and the diversity of species and ecosystems within a landscape or biogeographical region.  

Prof Basset goes on to discuss the infinitesimal probability of what we take for granted, what we observe in nature, actually having developed at all, through natural selection and evolution, over the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth. A development based on random mutations that made certain individuals fitter and more likely to leave progeny than others, so as to produce stable communities, be they of the species or of the landscape. Which places an enormous responsibility on our shoulders, because human activities are now interfering with and changing something that is not intrinsically stable, but the product of 3 billion years of development against the odds. We humans are destroying biodiversity faster than we can quantify how many species actually make up our biosphere. A complex and fragile biodiversity that we should take more care to protect. 

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 European Union as pilot action to deepen the new European Research Area.

Ron Dekker, principal consultant at the Technopolis Group in Belgium, who leads the Horizon Europe project EOSC Future, explains in this podcast how it is also this innovation data space is fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data. It operates under well-defined conditions to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest. EOSC Future enables a step change across scientific communities and research infrastructures towards seamless access FAIR data management (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and reliable reuse of research data and other digital objects produced along the research life cycle.

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 Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and air pollutants. The data provide information on distribution and long-term changes in the troposphere and lowermost stratosphere, including regular vertical profiles over major cities. IAGOS is unusual as a Research Infrastructure in that the hardware is minimal: the data is collected from 9 commercial passenger aircraft worldwide, each of which makes approximately 500 flights per year. The IAGOS database is used by researchers world-wide to study the changing atmosphere and to validate climate and air quality models. It also feeds into the United Nations'  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and into the European Earth Observation programme Copernicus.

ENVRI, on the other hand, is the community of Research Infrastructures in the environmental field in Europe, covering all aspects of Earth system sciences research. Starting in 2011, ENVRI brought together all the existing Research Infrastructures, collected their governance models and management systems for data and background service provision and created a reference model so that new Research Infrastructures don't have to reinvent the wheel. From 2019 to 2023, ENVRI-FAIR helped the Environmental Research Infrastructures make their data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable through harmonised metadata descriptions, and established the technical preconditions for the successful implementation of virtual, federated machine-to-machine interfaces. The integration of services across Research Infrastructures continues to progress through the ENVRI-Hub portal. 

 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 in the microorganisms and viruses collections. 

Niels Raes from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands represents the Dutch node of DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, which is taking the integration of those data to new levels, working with more than 170 Natural History Museums, botanical gardens, universities and other natural history institutions across all of Europe, to create a business model that uses the same processes and protocols. The ultimate goal is to build one big, single European distributed natural history system that unifies all the scientific data that is hosted by those individual institutions. That collection, when finalised, will be digital and FAIR - meaning that the data will be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - so that access digital data and metadata on 1.5 billion physical objects will be as easy as logging in to your computer, through the newly developed specification for open Digital Specimens (openDS), an open source digital twin of the physical specimens. Naturally, this information is available all over the world.

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 80,000 different datasets and nearly 2.3 billion records.

Executive Secretary Joe Miller, the guest of this episode, emphasises the importance of standardising machine-driven data that might come from camera traps or the enormous quantity of environmental data available through DNA sequencing of soils. New data comes every day, and the development of tools and products to meet users' needs never stops. 

On their website, visitors can select a species on the occurrences page and look around or use the 'literature' feature to explore all the users of GBIF data, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moreover, GBIF hosts hundreds of papers about climate change, agricultural biodiversity, ecology, or evolution, crediting data collectors thanks to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Have a look!