Fiches de projet

Biobanks provide well characterized samples to researchers supporting biomedical research at all development stages. The European infrastructure for biobanking BBMRI-ERIC is reflected in the National Node BBMRI.be, established in 2013 at the Belgian Cancer Registry. In 2018, the Royal Decree on the biobanks changed the Belgian biobanking landscape as all human body material used for research now needs registration in an official Belgian biobank. Many standing, often academic, collections were thus absorbed into existing biobanks. At about the same time, the ISO 20387 accreditation, providing a quality framework for biobanks, was launched, but currently is not yet included in the portfolio of the Belgian accreditation organization BELAC. The ISO standard provides an excellent opportunity for the biobank infrastructure to harmonize the existing quality management systems and to expand their use to the add-on collections. Such increased quality level benefits the research community as high-quality sample collections are reflected into high impact research. In this proposal, BBMRI.be aims to develop a stepwise quality improvement program that can be implemented at the individual biobanks. At the same time, an accreditation program will be established together with BELAC, ultimately leading to ISO accreditation. This will have an impact on the sustainability of the Belgian biobanks within the European framework.

The ESFRI SHARE-ERIC is one of the largest research infrastructures in human sciences in Europe. The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a micro data set on health, socio-economic status, and social networks of 140,000 individuals aged 50+ in 27 European countries and Israel. Since 2004, the SHARE project has completed eight waves, one every two years (480,000 interviews), plus two other waves in 2020 and 2021 dedicated to the impact of COVID-19. The anonymized data enable registered researchers to analyse the health, social, and economic life dimensions of the ageing population. By July 2021, more than 3,000 scientific publications are based on SHARE research data. Also national and international institutions such as the European Union rely on SHARE research data to construct cross-country comparable statistics on ageing. In Belgium SHARE research data are used to support evidence-based policy making in several key federal interests.
The Co-SHARE consortium consists of two university teams (the Centre for Social Policy Herman Deleeck (CSB) at the University of Antwerp (UA) and the Center of Public Economics and Population Economics (CREPP) at the University of Liège (ULiege)) and the Federal Planning Bureau as subcontractor. The university teams have been associated to the SHARE project from the beginning and act as Country Teams in charge of the project for the Dutch and French speaking population, respectively. From the creation of the SHARE-ERIC in 2011, Belgian federal entities supported the SHARE project in Belgium: BELSPO covers coordination costs and the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and Ministry of Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB) cover fieldwork costs upon the Dutch and French speaking population.
The general aim of the Co-SHARE project is to assure the Belgian participation to the ESFRI SHARE-ERIC and to support its mission for the Belgian population. The main outcome of the Co-SHARE project will be the (Belgian) SHARE data for Wave 9 and 10 (and beyond). In this project proposal, this general project aim is translated into three specific project objectives: (1) Coordination, project management and reporting; (2) Data Management; and (3) Valorisation, diffusion, and exploitation of research data and results. In this proposal, we will discuss how these objectives will be met, how the project will be concretely implemented, and what the expected results are.

The ICOS-BE project gathers several Belgian ICOS actors including both FSI (BIRA-IASB and RBINS) involved in the European ICOS Research Infrastructure (RI). All partners together represent the three ICOS components: atmosphere, ocean and ecosystem, and are already contributing to the ICOS RI. The coordinator is also a major player in the targeted integration of the Total Carbon Observing Network (TCCON) in ICOS.
The implementation of the project will result in:

• Extended ICOS-compliant and TCCON data sets of greenhouse gas (GHG) near-surface concentrations and total column abundances, resp., at the ICOS class 2 atmospheric station of the Ile de La Réunion;
• Improved Autonomous Underway Measurement System (AUMS) fully operational onboard the new Research Vessel (RV) Belgica, complemented with additional ocean data;
• The RV Belgica labelled as an oceanic class 2 station;
• Innovative collocated GHG atmospheric concentration and GHG flux measurements, during a test campaign at a Belgian ecosystem site, and later at the Congoflux tower ecosystem site in Congo, with the perspective of long-term operations;
• The start of collaborative interdisciplinary work between the ICOS atmospheric and ecosystem communities in Belgium, and the perspective of also implementing atmospheric GHG measurements onboard the RV Belgica;
• Transmission of knowledge to the younger generation and to Congolese scientists, through training of young technicians and a (preferably African) PhD student in ICOS operations;
• Dissemination and valorisation of all gathered datasets via the Carbon Portal, Belgian Marine Data Centre and international datacenters, and communication of project results to the research community and stakeholders.

Belgium’s National Scientific Library- KBR, is responsible for preserving historical & cultural objects and for ensuring & providing access to the public. The proposed Virtual Lab allows KBR to develop an infrastructure to facilitate data-on-demand services for the public and researchers to generate data corpora from available KBR data. This includes the technical & practical development of authentication & authorisation for users, to implement APIs to query & export KBR’s data, with support from BELNET. Providing collections as data affords digital humanities research on cultural heritage collections, allowing us to pose different questions to understand our history. E-infrastructures provide opportunities for facilitating access & use of these collections. The KBR Virtual Lab is a contribution to DARIAH and the open data directive, by developing an infrastructure for Belgian & European researchers to access KBR’s collections as data. This infrastructure will contribute to the establishment of KBR’s Digital Data Strategy (2022-2024) and implement the feasibility studies of data.kbr.be & goals of the Digital Research Lab to facilitate text and data mining on the collections. It also contributes goals in the future Action Plan (2022- 2024) in supporting digitisation and facilitating KBR’s data as FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable & reusable. The Virtual Lab can be used as a best practice for other federal science organizations in considering how to make collections as data available to users, and integrate data-on-demand services to automate the compiling of data corpora.

The current proposal aims at developing the Artificial Hard Substrate Garden (AHSG), a modular and flexible in-situ test facility serving field-based experimental research on the effects of artificial hard substrates and supporting nature inclusive design of marine constructions. This service will be housed by the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC), a distributed Research Infrastructure supporting marine science and Blue Growth. RBINS is the only EMBRC operator focusing on the ecology of artificial hard substrates and therefore the AHSG will fill an important gap in the EMBRC service portfolio. The service offer will serve important research and the development of the Blue Economy and is very timely as (1) Blue Growth initiatives (including the installation of renewable energy devices) will result in very large amounts of artificial hard substrate in environments where such habitat was absent (the sandy offshore environment); (2) competition for space results in occupying deeper or more dynamic marine areas and (3) there is an emerging desire to combine offshore construction with reinforcing the marine environment through science-based nature inclusive design.
We will integrate and optimise existing project-based components in a centrally managed AHSG, develop procedures for cost-efficient maintenance, Standard Operational Protocols and Method Statements and firmly anchor the RBINS service offer in EMBRC in terms of administration, organization, and operations. Finally, a sustainability plan will pave the road towards a continued service offer beyond the lifetime of the project.

The “European Plate Observing System” (EPOS) presently provides pre-operational access to a first set of Solid Earth data and services to measure how the ground moves and understand the underlying physical processes. EPOS is a very large and complex European e-infrastructure, integrating seismology, near-fault observatories, GNSS data and products, satellite data, geomagnetic observations, geological information and modelling… The Belgian federal component of EPOS includes data provision to EPOS, delivery of pre-operational EPOS Core Services as well as participation to the governance of the EPOS Core Services. KSB-ORB, one of the Belgian Federal Scientific Institutes (FSI), currently ensures all these activities.
This project will secure the delivery of the six pan-European GNSS services that KSB-ORB declared as potential future EPOS Core Services in the EPOS-GNSS Consortium Agreement (signed by KSB-ORB in 2019) by establishing a collaboration agreement with EPOS ERIC for the operation of these services in order to anchor them in EPOS. For this purpose, the project will further develop and take the necessary steps to facilitate the long-term maintenance of KSB-ORB’s two least mature services: the GNSS data node and the GNSS data quality monitoring services.
Additionally, this project will map the current Belgian federal data provision to EPOS and investigate if additional data or services can be provided to EPOS. To achieve this goal, it will ensure the necessary interface between potential Belgian federal stakeholders and the relevant EPOS components.

The TREE4FLUX project will support the participation of the Wood Biology Service of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in the UGent-led eddy covariance (EC) CongoFlux tower located in Yangambi (D.R.Congo). The first ambition of TREE4FLUX is to complete the labelling process for CongoFlux and subsequently maintain the label of associated station in the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS), by generating the first continuous multi-annual series of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes measured above African old-growth rainforest. A second ambition is to tackle the shortcomings inherent to the ‘top-down’ EC approach, by capitalizing on combined RMCA and UGent expertise to develop, consolidate and structurally organise ‘bottom-up’ tree monitoring infrastructures in and around the CongoFlux footprint (the area actually monitored by the EC equipment). These infrastructures will consist of three types of permanent forest inventory plots (intensive, large-scale and geographically dispersed) and the in situ RMCA-led Yangambi wood laboratory. The bottom-up data will be used to validate, complement and strengthen top-down CO2 flux data and will be uploaded as ancillary data to the ICOS carbon portal, which will firmly anchor the position of the combined infrastructures within ICOS. By clinging together RMCA and UGent-led infrastructures, TREE4FLUX will turn Yangambi into the first ‘supersite’ to measure CO2 fluxes in the African tropical rainforest. Combined data will enable robust upscaling of CO2 fluxes, providing benchmark estimates for (inter)national policy, which will further valorise the infrastructures. CongoFlux and its bottom-up infrastructures will complement the ICOS-labelled Guyaflux station in French Guyana. Together, these stations will enable ICOS to capture tropical forest ecosystem responses to climate change and contribute to a complete understanding of global GHG cycles.