Digital twins predict the future of nature

The Dutch research consortium LTER-LIFE, in which UvA-IBED researcher W. Daniel Kissling and UvA-IvI researcher Zhiming Zhao are involved, receives a 20 million euro grant from the National Roadmap funding for large-scale research infrastructure of NWO and the Ministry of Education. The project will create digital twins of ecosystems to predict the consequences of future global change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Together with researchers from four other Dutch scientific institutes, Zhiming Zhao, a computer science researcher at the Informatics Institute (IvI) and W. Daniel Kissling, an ecologist at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), will set up a virtual research environment that provides comprehensive and diverse ecological and environmental data, advanced modelling tools and high-performance computing techniques. With this e-infrastructure, ecologists can link long-term data on plants, animals and the environment and investigate multiple scenarios of how global change will impact whole ecosystems. They can share methods for data harmonization, modelling and simulation, and build digital equivalents of entire ecosystems. Unique virtual facility. LTER stands for Long-term Ecosystem Research, an international network of facilities that includes the Dutch nature areas Hoge Veluwe and the Wadden Sea.