LifeWatch ERIC is the e-Science European Research Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, a distributed Research e-Infrastructure to advance biodiversity research and to provide major contributions addressing the big environmental challenges, including knowledge-based solutions to environmental managers for its preservation, particularly focusing on to measure the impact of Global Climate Change issues on Earth Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research. This goal is achieved by providing access through a single infrastructure to a multitude of data sets, e-Services and tools enabling the construction and operation of Virtual Research Environments (VREs), which allow the accelerated capture of data with new innovative technologies and knowledge-based decision making-support for the management of biodiversity and ecosystems.

Since 2017, LifeWatch is legally constituted as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium –ERIC. Its expected impact is to be a structuring tool for the European Research Area –ERA-in tight collaboration with other world areas (particularly, Latin America & Caribbean), also supporting policy decision making addressing Societal Challenges which demand scientific knowledge in a Global Climate Change context, including Citizen Science activities. In fact, LifeWatch ERIC is relevant for environmental awareness programs to respond to the social, industrial and scientific challenges posed by the loss of biodiversity, and the deployment of ecosystem sustainable management and eco-innovation activities, and was identified as the 1st RI of interest scored by EU-LAC Research Infrastructure Communities.