BiodivERsA is a network composed of national organisations funding or managing research programmes on biodiversity across Europe. The objectives of this ERA-Net are to promote the cooperation between funding agencies in the field of biodiversity research and to coordinate research programmes at strategic and management levels to eventually develop and implement joint activities. The European partners in the BiodivERsA network have joined efforts to organize and fund a Pan-European call for international research projects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) is a 3 year project, involving 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens and other cooperating institutions. The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world’s published knowledge on the discovery and subsequent description of biological diversity. However, digital access to this knowledge is difficult. The objective of the BHL-Europe project is to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries. The project will provide a multilingual access point for biodiversity content through a global portal (BHL) with specific biological functionality and to a wide European cultural audience through Europeana. ... [Information of the supplier]
COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level. COST fosters the establishment of scientific excellence in the nine key domains. The domain "Biomedicine and Molecular Biosciences" (BMBS) covers all areas of medicine as practiced in Europe and basic, preclinical and clinical medical research developed to materialise the “bench to bedside” concept. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
As an initiative of environment agencies from Switzerland, Austria and Germany a new platform was launched: The Environment Observation Conference. More than 20 authorities of 6 nations stand behind it. The 1st resolutions have been published here. The working groups work mainly by electronic means. Since June 2007, the Conference is organised by the Environment Observation and Balance Council (EOBC). The 3rd conference will be in 2008, Berne. To the 4th conference in 2010 - to be held in the ch-de-fr Upper Rhine region - for the first time also participants others than public bodies will be invited. ... [Information of the supplier]
The EuMon project attempts to provide a European framework that standardizes, focuses and coordinates existing monitoring programs by comparing and integrating existing methods and monitoring schemes of species and habitats of community interests. The most successful methods in terms of cost effectiveness, regional robustness will be selected and tested for their European wide applicability. EuMon will pay special attention that existing monitoring programs can incorporate these methods and will give recommendations how new and successful monitoring programs can be established.Special consideration for implementing monitoring programs will be paid by studying the social effects of monitoring regimes, because the relationship between amateurs and professionals are meant to be most important for implementing a successful monitoring regime.The establishing of the NATURA 2000 network is one of the main actions on a European level to halt biodiversity loss. Therefore it is a prerequisite to evaluate its ability to maintain biodiversity. Additionally EuMon will develop methods to name the responsibility of EU Member states for the species and habitats of Community interests living under their protection.A comprehensive database on monitoring schemes and recommended methods will be established and made accessible via an Internet portal. ... [Information of the supplier]
Ascertaining when and where genes are expressed is of crucial importance in order to understand the physiological role of a given gene/protein and the interactions between them. In addition, the normal expression patterns can then be compared to those observed in a variety of pathological conditions to identify pathological hallmarks of gene expression. The EURExpress, an integrated project funded by the EU under the VI Framework proposes a transcriptome-wide acquisition of expression patterns chiefly by means of in situ hybridization (ISH) with non-radioactive probes and will use this data to establish a web-linked, interactive digital transcriptome atlas of embryonic mouse. The final goal of the project is to create the expression data of > 20,000 genes by RNA in situ hybridization on sagittal sections from E14.5 wild type murine embryos. This data will result in a detailed description (at a cellular level) of gene expression patterns in the developing mouse. The “transcriptome atlas” will be generated using a newly developed automated RNA in situ hybridization system. Automated scanning microscopes will collect image data, which will be electronically sent out in a digital format for annotation. The latter will be performed using a web-based “virtual” microscope and be entered in a hierarchical database specifically designed to hold large amounts of image data and display them in a user-friendly format. For a subset of genes, mainly those directly involved in human diseases, expression data will also be generated by using human and murine tissue arrays. This will offer the opportunity to compare human and mouse expression patterns in adult tissues. This project builds on a strong European concentration of skills in gene expression analysis and mouse genomics and integrates European skills, efforts, resources and information in the field of systematic gene expression analysis. All expression data generated by EURExpress will be made readily available to the scientific community via the EURExpress web-linked database, considerably advancing our knowledge of gene function and having a significant impact on the identification of gene expression markers of disease processes. ... [Information of the supplier]
The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, EDIT, is the collective answer of 27 leading European, North American and Russian institutions to a call of the European Commission, issued in 2004, for a network in « Taxonomy for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research ». This project has started on the 1rst of March 2006 and will last 5 years. Taxonomy provides the basis for understanding biodiversity. Overcoming the taxonomic impediment involves both having enough trained taxonomists and having taxonomic information available to those who need it. The project objectives are to help to reduce the fragmentation in European taxonomic research and expertise and to coordinate the European contribution to the global taxonomic effort, in particular the Global Taxonomy Initiative, through an integrated initiative aimed at improving society’s capacity for biodiversity conservation. ... [Information of the supplier]
The EUropean ROe DEER Information System (EURODEER) is an open project to support a collaborative process of data sharing to produce better science. It is based on a spatial database that store shared movement data on roe deer to investigate variation in roe deer behavioural ecology along environmental gradients or population responses to specific conditions, such as habitat changes, impact of human activities, different hunting regimes. EURODEER group is trying to fully explore the opportunities given by the new monitoring technologies for conservation and management at both local and global scale. The spatial database, built upon open source software (PostgreSQL + PostGIS) and hosted at Edmund Mach Foundation, can be connected to a large set of client applications (GIS, web interfaces, statistics) to help storing, managing, accessing and analysing GPS data from several research groups throughout Europe. At present 19 research groups join EURODEER. The database is static and temporary, but the perspective is to turn it into a permanently structured and dynamically updatable data repository of a long term project. ... [Information of the supplier]
Did you know that thanks to a common little snail that you can find in your garden, in the park or under a hedge, you can see evolution in your own back yard? OK, so evolution is a very slow process. Life on Earth started about three-and-a-half billion years ago! It's the tiny changes accumulating over a long, long time that got us here. And you can see some of those tiny steps by joining the Evolution MegaLab. ... [Information of the supplier]
FunDivEUROPE (Functional Significance of Forest Biodiversity in Europe) is a Collaborative Project within FP7 with the aim to quantify the role of forest biodiversity for ecosystem functioning and the delivery of goods and services in major European forest types. The consortium comprises in total 24 partner institutions from 15 countries, coordinating institution is the Faculty of Biology – Geobotany, University of Freiburg, Germany. ... [Information of the supplier]
