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Building research infrastructures in PARC - Where are we after a year?
One of the objectives of PARC is to promote the further improvement of the existing and the development of new infrastructural and human capacities in support of the research and innovation activities and integrated risk assessment carried out in PARC and beyond. The WP 9 ‘Building infrastructural and human capacities’ was designed with a long-term focus on enhancing the EU experimental capacities, promoting the networking and collaboration, increasing quality, reliability and comparability of newly generated data, mediating an increased access to and effective use of existing resources available within and beyond PARC, and contributing to the training of new generations of scientists and risk assessors in Europe.
During the first year of PARC, the initial inventory of existing resources was built, and a comprehensive catalogue was developed increasing the visibility and accessibility of these resources to multiple users. One of the lessons learnt is that several aspects need to be considered more strongly in the next years. Besides building on the outcomes of HBM4EU ↗ activities and simply collecting information on environmental monitoring networks, PARC needs to go much further and include also all resources needed to assess contamination of environmental matrices, indoor, articles and food and feed, as well as associated hazards and risks. Comprehensive information collected and organized in openly accessible catalogues will serve as a base for analysis of gaps, and definition of strategies for closing these gaps.
Furthermore, sustainability and interoperability of all tools developed under PARC must play a prominent role. Therefore, in the upcoming years, the collaboration will also be established with existing and newly developed research infrastructures (namely ESFRI ↗ infrastructures such as EIRENE ↗, BBMRI ↗or ELIXIR ↗) to explore their capacities, existing tools, and options to ensure sustainability of the PARC products.
These activities will continue to be carried out for the entire duration of the project and their outcomes will be regularly updated.