The ALICE Interreg project organized “A roadmap to multifunctional and resilient landscapes: the adaptation to global change through Blue and Green Infrastructure Networks (BGINs)” Final Congress on March 16-17, 2021. Nearly 300 people from 40 countries attended the different sessions, which were available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
The two-day digital event was a great milestone because it put an end to the tremendous commitment required by the ALICE’s partners throughout the past three years towards adapting to climate change in Portugal, Spain, Northern Ireland, France and the United Kingdom through the generation of different future scenarios – BGINs amongst them.
During the congress, speakers had the chance to wrap-up the main achievements of the project accomplished since November 2017, while discussing the main learnings and conclusions drawn from these years of collaborative work.
Among the different sessions, there was one especially dedicated to ecosystem services modelling, where researchers from the ARIES team at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) highlighted the modelling effort towards making interoperability a reality within the project and beyond.
Alba Márquez, PhD fellow at BC3 and ARIES modelling expert, opened the modelling session by providing the audience with an example of a pastureland and livestock model she had adapted to k.IM, the semantic language of the ARIES technology – k.LAB –. During her talk, Alba stressed the importance of semantics in order to enable data and models to be FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable –.
Stefano Balbi, Ikerbasque research fellow at BC3 and ARIES managing director, took the floor afterwards to deepen the knowledge integration concept, as well as the new paradigm that ARIES offers for improved model interoperability.
The different talks were followed by an interactive round table where presenters had the chance to get together and share their views on the future of ecosystem services management.
Ferdinando Villa, Ikerbasque Professor at BC3 and ARIES lead investigator, emphasized the key role that ARIES can play in linking and making the products of the best science available to citizens and decision-makers, thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and semantics.
Eager to learn more about the ALICE project’s modelling outcomes? Watch the full ALICE Final Congress’ modelling session in the video below!
