Jesús Miguel Santamaría, (BIO'91 PhD'95) PhD in Biology and Environment and Full Professor of Chemistry Analytical at the University of Navarra, has been elected president of the committee Board of Directors of LifeWatch-ERIC, the European Virtual Science and Technology Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystems research .

This platform, which is part of the initiatives of the European Strategy Forum on Scientific Infrastructures (ESFRI), has as goal to connect all the instructions of data on biodiversity and environment existing in Europe and other continents, and thus facilitate free access to this information, as well as the employment of virtual tools that are useful for scientists, environmental managers and citizens.

To this end, it has an initial budget of 64 million euros, of which Spain has contributed 7.5 million euros for its start-up, which will be supplemented to 23.5 million euros over the next five years, through the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness.

As the expert, director of the Integrated Environmental Qualitylaboratory of the School Sciences (LICA), points out, biodiversity is facing new challenges arising from the impact of human activities and environmental changes: "All this challenges us to four major challenges that we must solve to protect the biodiversity of the planet: climate change, habitat fragmentation and loss, the invasion of exotic species, and compound - or cumulative - impacts, such as the impact of humans on ecosystems, for example, since the effects of our activities cannot be assessed in isolation. We also need to understand exactly how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are related.

reference letter global infrastructure for the protection of Biodiversity

LifeWatch-ERIC's goal consists precisely in integrating digital services (e-services) in a multi-country infrastructure with virtual laboratories at research (VRE). "In these laboratories," adds Full Professor, "complex mathematical models are used for the main factors involved in biodiversity loss, which facilitates decision-making to reverse the current trend of severe biodiversity loss."

The infrastructure is participated by a consortium of eight countries: Belgium, Slovenia, Greece, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain. Spain will lead the virtual infrastructure and coordinate the entire ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) base.

For the expert from the University of Navarra, the responsibility of directing this infrastructure "is enormous. However, the experience accumulated as the Spanish representative of the group of work on Environment of ESFRI has allowed me to know in depth the operation of the infrastructures of research European. In addition, we have a great team of work. Together we will try to turn LifeWatch-ERIC into a worldwide reference letter infrastructure for the protection, management and sustainable use of biodiversity", he concludes.