The Molecular Biodiversity Greece community

In the face of the biodiversity crisis, concerted efforts towards understanding the effects of climate change and habitat loss and fragmentation, both locally and globally, are urgently needed. These are often attempted by leveraging the advances of modern genomics and bioinformatics methodologies. Especially in biodiversity hotspots, the need to understand, monitor and mitigate the loss of biodiversity is pivotal. Greece is a country with especially high endemism. A large percentage of its endemic species is threatened by climate change and human activities.

To this end, the national academic community in biodiversity genomics has established a corresponding network of scientists from various Greek research institutes and universities covering different disciplines of biodiversity research. The network aims to support and combine individual actions to establish a Task Force that will channel the flow of information amongst researchers, policy makers, stakeholders and the local society.

Our overarching goal is to build a sustainable community and infrastructure for the efficient management of the entire molecular biodiversity data cycle (i.e., from production and storage to the analysis and modelling of data, development of computational tools, and knowledge extraction). Using national and European infrastructures, such as ELIXIR and LifeWatch, we envision to set the ground for studying biodiversity through the lens of biodiversity genomics and offer evidence-based knowledge to guide management of the habitats and the biodiversity they host, as well as the implementation of appropriate policies.

Aims and Goals

The community hasa dual form. First, a diverse, inclusive network of people, with complementarity expertise and a vested interest in the study of molecular biodiversity, and second a network of networks, i.e. major initiatives that can support and promote the efforts around biodiversity.

Our goals:

1. Assist the local community to embrace modern genomics technologies as basic tool for assessing and monitoring biodiversity
2. Promote the Molecular Biodiversity Greece Community as a reference point for the study, research, and conservation of biodiversity, both in relevant initiatives within Greece as well as at the European level, and fully aligned to complementary efforts (such as the ELIXIR Biodiversity Community), aiming at supporting large scale projects transcending initiatives to result in high quality outputs. 3. Develop appropriate connections with key external biodiversity partners in the field (as identified in the network of networks), and facilitate its growth while ensuring minimal overlap of the respective activities.
3. Develop core Bioinformatics open-source tools for analysing Biodiversity data
4. Develop and maintain a portfolio of tools, services, outreach and training, tailored to biodiversity researchers and conservationists, exposing the appropriate services that can be utilised to promote research in the field, while always maintaining an open channel of communication with the community for feedback and growth.
5. Promotion of the importance of bioinformatics and molecular technologies for biodiversity conservation among conservation agencies (public and private), by directly assisting policy decision making through a high level alignment of strategy and policy at the national and european level.

Our roadmap

A. Community Building

• Understand and catalogue the capabilities, interests, major players and ongoing projects in this area across the key external partners in Greece
• Contact and interview major biodiversity research players in Greece, that have interest in bioinformatics, to establish a broader contact list for regular communication
• A contact/mailing list with the major biodiversity research players interviewed
• Support the operation of the Community, in addition to the existing support that is provided to the individuals comprising the network (either through their Institutions or via the respective Initiatives).
• Establish an annual meeting of the Greek Biodiversity Community. Sharing the outcome of individual efforts to the rest of the network will maximise community uptake and add-on value.

B. Technical aspects / Development / Implementation

• Work on defining community-backed metadata standards, to facilitate interoperability. These standards will be showcased through demonstration projects.
• Support the adoption of best practices that implement FAIRification strategies.
• Promote sequencing of local species, thus leading to an increased representation of Greek species and populations in sequence databases (and the metadata accompanying them), and therefore allow for monitoring the overall progress.
• Increase visibility of the existing computational infrastructures (such as ELIXIR-GR Ypatia, LifeWatch’s Tesseract, HCMR/IMBBC HPC Zorbas) and provide practical guidelines, examples and support in using them. Priority will be given to interoperable workflows that are compatible across the various computational infrastructures. Demonstration projects reusing partner developed components/datasets will be pursued.
• Develop new core software tools.
• Construct a comprehensive catalogue of computational tools that can be effectively used in the study, research and conservation of Biodiversity
• Address emerging challenges by building on the existing capacity of the community in developing new tools and methods.

C. Outreach

• Organise a kick-off workshop involving all contacted parties of the broader group, in order to coordinate efforts towards this goal - to be organised together with the annual meeting of the Community.
• Organise support for biodiversity researchers in Greece, through a web portal, similar to “ELIXIR support for biodiversity research” (at the very least we can setup a dedicated GitHub-pages site)
• Organise training workshops (either as volunteer or as funded efforts), for upskilling the members of the Community, while establishing connections to new members. This high quality training resources (courses and materials) will aim to empower all relevant stakeholders to make full use of the ecosystem of services of the Molecular Biodiversity Greece Community
• Establish an outreach profile through selected social media channels (such as twitter, etc), as well as open communication channels (such as slack, etc).
• At mid-/long-term organise “science and society” activities. These can refer to the broad public, to citizen scientists, and to focused organisations like WWF or others.
• Prepare a regular newsletter, focused towards conservationists

About us

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Resources

• Our mailing list: mbgc@lists.certh.gr
• Zenodo Community Paper: Building the Molecular Biodiversity Greece Community

• Overview F1000 Slides (ELIXIR AHM 2023): MBGC: the Molecular Biodiversity Greece Community

• Special session at HELECOS11: http://helecos11.upatras.gr/programma/

How to get involved?

how?