Abstract EANA2024-98

Supported by the International Space Science Institute (ISSI [1]) and the European Astrobiology Institute (EAI [2]), the TRACERS Team brings together a gender-balanced, multinational, multidisciplinary team of scientists and philosophers of science who address three fundamental questions on the unambiguous detection of life beyond Earth as well as tracers of the earliest life on Earth: (i) where do we need to search for life, (ii) how do we define what we are searching for, and (iii) how do we correctly interpret our findings?

Our team has recently published a review of biosignature concepts [3] and is now building on this by constructing a user-friendly, universal, well-defined, open-access, online tracers portal. In its current incarnation, the portal retrieves useful literature related to core concepts in astrobiology/exobiology, including those relating to tracers of life and habitable environments. Important terms drawn from disparate but relevant fields can be selected with a click and combined with each other and with your own search terms. The portal uses Google Scholar and therefore remains more up-to-date and impartial than a human-curated database. We hope the portal will aid teaching and research by facilitating new connections, and will help newcomers to recognise and explore the diversity of terms and topics in astro/exobiology.

The poster will enable a discussion with the scientific community on the purpose of this portal as well as necessary future functionalities identified by the community.

[1] ISSI Working Group “Towards a Universal Tracers Portal in Astrobiology”, https://collab.issibern.ch/universaltracerportal/

[2] EAI Project Team “Tracing Life and Identifying Habitable Environments”, https://europeanastrobiology.eu/2021/04/28/project-team-tracing-life-and-identifying-habitable-environments%e2%80%8b/

[3] Malaterre et al. (2023) Is there such a thing as a biosignature? Astrobiology 23, 1213–1227: https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2023.0042