BioDT 2nd Webinar Report

On the 27 September the BioDT Team organised its second webinar to learn more about the BioDT use cases, our unique demonstrators to test the biodiversity Digital Twin prototype.

The aim of the BioDT prototype is to help better predict global biodiversity dynamics and how species interact with their environment and with each other.

In order to test the work the BioDT team will develop over the course of three years, groups of use cases that showcase how BioDT can examine its predictive performance and address biodiversity challenges through scenario simulations, predictions and biomonitoring methods.

The four use cases groups that BioDT is developing focus on:  

• Species response to environmental change, which puts attention on biodiversity dynamics and ecosystems services;
• Genetically detected biodiversity, that aims to bring research forward for crop wild relatives and genetic resources for food security and DNA detected biodiversity, poorly known habitats;
• Dynamics and threats from and for species of policy concern, that explores invasive species and endangered species;
• Species interactions with each other and with humans, that studies disease outbreaks and pollinators.

Meet our Research Infrastructure Partners

There are four main Research Infrastructures involved in the BioDT project:

1. The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a Research Infrastructure for Natural Science Collections.
2. The Global BioDiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure providing open access to biodiversity data.
3. LifeWatch ERIC is the e-Science European infrastructure for biodiversity & ecosystem research.
4. The Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem (eLTER) focuses on critical zone and socio-ecological research.

Describing Twins for Biodiversity use cases

By Merijn de Bakker & Jeroen Broekhuijsen, TNO

During the WP6 workshop in Jyväskylä, Finland, a new template was created to describe the use cases of the project and how digital twins fit into these use cases. The template is based on an existing seven-step-approach by the EU project Change2Twin. Given this approach, Jesse Harrison (CSC, BioDT Project Manager) developed a process guide to go through these steps in order to create a functional twin.

The LUMI Supercomputer

The BioDT project co-ordinator CSC is hosting the pan-European pre-exascale supercomputers, LUMI at CSC's data center in Kajaani, Finland.

LUMI is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) who is pooling European resources to develop top-of-the-range exascale supercomputers for processing big data, based on competitive European technology.

LUMI is one of the world’s best-known scientific instruments for the lifespan of 2021–2026.