Biodiversity and ecosystem data follow a life cycle that includes several steps, such as planning, collection, quality improvement, and description and documentation through metadata. These are followed by preservation through curation and publication, as well as discovery and integration. The final stages involve analysis, which can lead to informed and effective decisions on conservation and restoration policies and strategies, as well as environmental management in general. This process involves a series of challenges, and the need to make data both fit-for-use and interoperable often represents one of the main limitations and barriers in (meta)data management. Despite ongoing efforts to promote common models by some communities, such as the European Network of enVironmental Research Infrastructures for environmental science, the harmonisation of vocabularies and metadata across Research Infrastructures remains a persistent challenge, locking data away. For this purpose, LifeWatch ERIC, the e-Science European infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, developed the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue, a comprehensive, standards-based information management system that ensures records are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). In doing so, it enables structured and standardised information to be openly available, promoting reuse, sharing, and integration. This paper presents the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue by describing its conceptual architecture and its core functionalities.
Vaira et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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