The LifeWatch Service Centre Plan

This report summarises the construction plan for the Lifewatch Service Centre. The main purpose of LifeWatch is to serve the biodiversity and ecosystem research community in its work on the understanding and rational management of our ecosystems for use by policy makers, resource managers, the private sector and the general public. To do this the LifeWatch infrastructure will provide capabilities to analyse, model and simulate with integrated biodiversity and ecosystem data from many diverse sources to address the huge gaps we have in our understanding of life on Earth. Its innovative and flexible design will also enable the community led development of on-line facilities for data access combined with advanced models, algorithms and computational capability. LifeWatch will provide resources and services to data and model users, data providers and for general networking. An overview of these resources can be explored through “LifeWatch: the Guide” (Box 1) which is available on the LifeWatch web-site at http://lw.ceh.ac.uk/. The Service Centre provides the interface with all the stakeholders of the LifeWatch community and will be the first point of contact for all enquiries concerning LifeWatch. It is the “connector” between users of LifeWatch and the capabilities it provides.