Biodiversity is crucial for food security, medicinal sources, socioeconomic benefits, cultural and aesthetic values, and ecosystem resilience under global change. Biodiversity science combines fields including ecology, biology, genetics, economics, and geography, which often have a relatively short history of computational research. However, research in the field is becoming increasingly data-intensive and models more complex, requiring the use of supercomputers. This is connected to a need for improved modelling approaches that can handle large volumes of data and produce reliable predictions of biodiversity shifts in response to pressures including changes in climate and land-use. Biodiversity data are also diverse in terms of their quality, coverage, and openness. Successfully considering biodiversity as part of decision-making therefore requires access to increasingly harmonised, open, and quality-controlled data.
The Digital Twins (DTs) concept represents a solution to address the needs of modern biodiversity research. A digital twin can be defined as a virtual, interactive replica of a real-world entity or process, consisting of data, a model (the digital representation of a real-world process), and methods to connect the data and the model.
The Horizon Europe Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) project advanced the frontiers of biodiversity science by developing prototypes of DTs of different aspects of biodiversity dynamics. The DTs developed are deployed by leveraging EuroHPC world-class supercomputers such as LUMI and Karolina and national computational resources. BioDT addressed the following key objectives:
1- Building and deploying prototype DTs corresponding to several biodiversity topics
2- Integrating the DTs with research infrastructures that play a key role in facilitating access to biodiversity data
3- Ensuring the interoperability of BioDT with the EC flagship programme Destination Earth
Through its work on demonstrating the technological feasibility of DTs in ecological research and facilitating access to biodiversity data, BioDT paved the way for groundbreaking changes in ecology, including establishing new types of interactive tools for monitoring ecosystem health, with benefits for a broad range of end-users, including citizens, researchers, and policymakers.
