This online and interactive environment provides access to all data of the European Tracking Network. The VRE includes a database for storage and integration of acoustic telemetry data and a number of analytical tools for analysing the data using R that are: - the LifeWatch Data Explorer for fish telemetry, a RShiny GUI for data exploration; - an RStudio IDE that allows the user to develop and run R scripts online on the available telemetry data; - an Rpackage that incorporates specific functions to start a smooth analysis of telemetry data. The ETN data management platform is an online web application to store, access and share aquatic telemetry data and metadata. The portal is open to all European users for data management of telemetry data in marine, estuarine and freshwater environments. ETN now contains data of 15 fish species. Currently ETN supports acoustic telemetry data, but aims to extend this to different telemetry techniques (e.g. PIT data-storage tags and satellite tags) to be able to monitor habitat use and migration patterns of a range of species in the aquatic environment. On a technical note, the portal requires the receiver and deployment metadata, as well as the transmitter tag and animal metadata before detection data can be uploaded. The uploaded data are subjected to quality control. Access is password protected and data moratorium rules are in place. The ETN data portal is developed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) as part of the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch. New developments and additional features are added on a continuous basis. The web application is built using PHP (using the Symfony framework) for the back-end side and Bootstrap/jQuery/Datatables/… (among others) to facilitate the development of the front-end side.

The purpose of MarineRegions is to create a standard, relational list of geographic names, coupled with information and maps of the geographic location of these features. Marine Regions is an integration of the VLIMAR Gazetteer and the VLIZ Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase (MARBOUND). The VLIMAR Gazetteer is a database with geographic, mainly marine names such as seas, sandbanks, seamounts, ridges, bays or even standard sampling stations used in marine research. The geographic cover of the VLIMAR gazetteer is global but initially focused on the Belgian Continental Shelf and the Scheldt Estuary and the Southern Bight of the North Sea. Gradually more regional and global geographic information was added to VLIMAR and combining this information with the Maritime Boundaries database, representing the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the world, led to the creation of marineregions.org.​ In order to preserve the identity of the marine geographic objects from the database, and to name and locate the geographic resources on the web, MarineRegions promotes the Marine Regions Geographic IDentifier, or the MRGID. Developed by: MarineRegions is managed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). Funding for the creation of the VLIMAR gazetteer was provided initially through the EU Network of Excellence MarBEF, but also other European initiative such as EMODNet and Lifewatch provide the necessary funding for the maintenance and management of MarineRegions. Used data resources: MarineRegions uses several sources: marine boundaries, ecological classifications, fishing zones, thematic gazetteers, regional gazetteers, global gazetteers and several others. Web services: MarineRegions provides numerous web services which allow the user to have direct access to the geographic data, maps and metadata from a GIS desktop or for online applications. Currently MarineRegions provides the OGC services WMS, WFS and CSW.

IMNGS is a platform that uniformly and systematically screens for, retrieves, processes, and analyses all available prokaryotic 16S rRNA gene amplicon datasets from public repositories and uses them to build sample-specific sequence databases and OTU-based profiles. The retrieved information can be used to address questions of relevance in microbial ecology, for example with respect to the occurrence of specific microorganisms in different ecosystems or to perform targeted diversity studies. IMNGS also offers a complete pipeline for de novo analysis of a user's own raw amplicon sequencing data generated using the Illumina technology. Due to the personalised nature of many functions and the high computational cost related to the performed tasks, only registered users can submit jobs (registration can be done via the IMNGS home page; regsiter there as a Guest to learn more about what it can do). The IMNGS web interface can then be used to: search and select datasets/samples (runs), create and launch jobs, and inspect the outputs of the jobs. Developed by: Ilias Lagkouvardos, Technical university of Munich (TUM) Used data resources: SRA repository amplicon studies, user query 16S sequence, user raw amplicon sequences Used in tools: USEARCH Technology or platform: Django, Python, PostgreSQL

One of the virtual laboratories developed by LifeWatch Belgium is the Belgian LifeWatch eLab. This online application allows users to standardise, analyse and visualise their data, making use of web services built on top of internal and external reference databases. The ultimate goal of LifeWatch is to set up a network for data exchange and data analysis through web services. Web services are systems that allow communication between two computers over the web, and allow the user to access the most recent and up-to-date information directly from within other applications. Within LifeWatch Belgium, several web services are available to standardise, analyse and visualise your data, and to extract additional data from several sources. The user can select several data services (taxonomic, geographic, thematic, etc.) and run them successively through a straightforward online user interface. You can also use the LifeWatch.be web services in a concatenated way, i.e. the output of one web service is the input for the next web service. Establishing such workflows helps solving (complicated) biological questions. Several use cases demonstrate the use of the LifeWatch web services. So as to facilitate the use of the LifeWatch web services, several applications and tools were documented in use cases and tutorials. These can be found on the links below, as well as on the specific websites of software packages and Github repositories. The Belgian LifeWatch E-Lab online application allows users to standardize, analyze and visualize their data, making use of web services built on top of internal and external reference databases. A user can select several data services (taxonomic, geographic, thematic, etc.) and run them successively through a straightforward user interface. As explained in the user guide, the LifeWatch.be web services can be used in a concatenated way, i.e. the output of one web service is the input for the next web service.

The Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure is an open-source software e-infrastructure financed by the Swedish Research Council and developed in close collaboration with the Living Atlases community and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The infrastructure will make biodiversity data available, provide powerful analysis and visualization tools, and thereby offer new opportunities for innovative and interdisciplinary research on biodiversity and ecosystems. The core mission of SBDI is to support Open Science and the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles in biodiversity and ecosystems research. The SBDI consortium includes 11 universities and government agencies in Sweden.

TITAN comprises a well-grounded stack of Big Data technologies including Apache Kafka for inter-component communication, Apache Avro for data serialisation and Apache Spark for data analytics. Furthermore, DRAMA framework is the underlying workflow orchestrator engine used by TITAN.

The RvLab is a very useful and powerful tool, both for users who are already familiar with R (and some of its functions) but also for students and/or scientists who are in favour of open source software and would like to dedicate some time to get familiar with its functions, without having to go through the steep command line R learning curve. The RvLab makes use of "R" which is a statistical processing environment widely used by scientists working in many biodiversity related disciplines. It supports an integrated and optimized (in respect to computational speed-up and data manipulation) online R environment. This vLab tackles common problems faced by R users, such as severe computational power deficit. Many of the routines operating under the R environment, such as the calculation of several biodiversity indices and the running of the multivariate analyses, are often of high computational demand and cannot deliver a result when the respective datasets are in the form of large matrices. The RvLab runs on a HPC cluster, using version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20) on a x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit) platform, and offers an intuitive virtual environment interface enabling users to perform analysis of ecological and microbial communities based on optimized vegan functions. The user can benefit from the availability of newly designed functions if the dataset to be analysed requires their implementation. The RvLab is an interactive virtual laboratory; should the user require other types of functions, these can be added in the "laboratory" and become available online in a short time. Login is required.

This interactive online tool gives access to all sensor data collected in the framework of the Flemish LifeWatch project, and provides an interface to explore and analyze these data. Several thematic portals have been set up as part of the Data Explorer: - Underway Data Explorer - Station Data Explorer - Zooplankton Data Explorer - GPS Bird Tracking Data Explorer - Fish Telemetry Data Explorer - Batcorder Data Explorer - CPOD (marine mammals) Data Explorer Within the RShiny LifeWatch Data Explorer, five general sections are available to explore, plot, visualize and download data. Some of the more recent data is temporarily under moratorium and therefore protected by password access. The LifeWatch Data Explorer is built using RShiny server, Leaflet, ggplot2, PLotly, Dygraph and DataTables. The system is able to query MSSQL, PostgreSQL, Geoserver (WFS) and MongoDB servers.

This vLab comprises of two online coupled models, which are parameterised and initialised for the specific conditions at a few specifically identified areas for which the required datasets exist. In an attempt to make the tool user friendly a graphic user interface (GUI) developed in the course of previous projects will be used. The GUI allows the user to view model results dynamically through any internet browser. Model results will be stored at the HCMR servers and the user will be able to select the area, scenario, and parameter required, which will then be returned as results in the form of plots. All model parameters and options will be available to the user online. The ultimate operation, therefore, of this vLab will be to allow the user to submit a request for the model to run under a different scenario than those already available.

Polytraits is a database on biological traits of bristle worms (Polychaeta). The database contains 47 different traits describing the morphological, behavioural, reproductive and larval features as well as the environmental affinities of a taxon. Each trait has several sub-categories, so-called modalities. In total, 252 modalities are covered. The expression of a trait in a taxon is coded in the database by declaring each modality as present or absent. Each assignment of a modality (and its presence/absence value) to a taxon is connected to a literature reference. This assignment is mandatory, no data can be entered without specifying the source of the data; however, to capture undocumented knowledge, the option "Expert's opinion" can be specified. Additionally, most records are accompanied by the quotation of the exact literature passage which has led to the coding of the information. Developed by: The project was initially started as an in-house project of the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. Traits were initially collected for an ecological analysis of polychaetes in Mediterranean lagoons, but since then the database has been continuously expanded to provide data for other analyses as well. Currently, Polytraits is being maintained by the Institute for Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and is supported by the Greek LifeWatch infrastructure.