European natural science collections (NSCs) are an integral and important part of the global natural and cultural capital. They include an estimated 1.5 billion animals, plants, fossils, rocks, minerals and meteorites, which account for 55% of the NSCs globally (Ariño 2010, Wheeler et al. 2012), and represent an estimated 80% of the world bio- and geo-diversity (CETAF 2015, The DiSSCo team 2017). The NSCs represent the primary reference material supporting biodiversity and geo-diversity discovery spanning 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s natural history which are constantly curated and updated through new scientific expeditions and research projects by more than 5000 full-time European scientists.

The last two decades have seen a rapid growth in the digitisation of NSCs, as well as the mobilisation of existing digital NSC data stored in local collection management systems of Natural History Museums (NHMs) and herbaria to the public domain (Nelson and Ellis 2018). The digitisation initiatives of NSC data include the United States National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) and related Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio*1) data portal, Australia’s Atlas of Living Australia (ALA*2), Mexico’s National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO*3), Brazil’s Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA*4), and China’s National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII*5) (Nelson and Ellis 2018). These initiatives are now complemented by the European Distributed System of Scientific Collections – DiSSCo*6 (Section 2). The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF*7) aggregates all available digital NSC data at a global level and now serves 1.6 billion records on the temporal and spatial distribution of biodiversity, of which 220 million records are derived from NHM specimens (Sept. 2020). This body of information is rapidly growing and contributes to numerous scientific (CODATA, the Committee on Data of the International Science Council' et al. 2020) and policy papers, notably the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019) and the Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2020).

Historically, the primary function of NSCs has been a record of biological and geological diversity and as references for taxonomists and geologists (Meineke et al. 2018b). Data derived from NSCs underpin all taxonomic species and mineral descriptions and countless innovations. These include many thousands of scientific publications and policy reports relating to environmental change, sustainability, health, and food security, inventions and products critical to our bio-economy, databases, maps and descriptions of scientific observations, instructional material for education, and informational material for the public (Suarez and Tsutsui 2004). The importance of NSCs relies on the variety of information they contain. NSCs not only represent the localities and dates of collection associated with the vouchered specimens and thereby provide large-scale, verifiable data on native and base-line distributions of organisms and how those distributions have changed through time (Page et al. 2015), the collections themselves constitute a far larger body of knowledge and likely include presently unknown knowledge (E.g. the scientific ‘omics’ domain is relatively recent). Physical specimens are an important source of information for many scientific disciplines including global change and conservation biology research (Meineke et al. 2018b), such as detecting shifts in morphological traits and trait expressions (e.g. body mass of animals and leaf shapes of plants; Yang et al. 2015, Gardner et al. 2011), phenological responses (e.g. flower and fruiting seasons of plants; Primack et al. 2004, Willis et al. 2017, Meineke et al. 2018a), shifts in nutrient compositions through time (McLauchlan et al. 2010), heavy metal accumulation (Weiss et al. 1999), mismatching of pollinator-plant interactions (Miller-Struttmann et al. 2015, Molnár et al. 2015, Byers 2017), herbivore interactions (Lees et al. 2011, Schilthuizen et al. 2016, Beauvais et al. 2017, Meineke et al. 2018a), pathogen discovery and pathobiology research (Cook et al. 2017, Cook et al. 2020, Dunnum et al. 2017, Murphy et al. 2020), and changes in physiological processes (Miller-Rushing et al. 2009), among many others. Next to information on the chemical composition and morphological expression of traits of species, NSCs are a key resource of genetic material, the very source of DNA barcodes (Hebert and Gregory 2005, Ratnasingham and Hebert 2007, Ratnasingham and Hebert 2013, Hollingsworth et al. 2009). DNA barcodes are instrumental to identify indicator species, invasive species or the community composition in biodiversity assessments using environmental or eDNA metabarcoding techniques (Corlett 2017, Deiner et al. 2017, Makiola et al. 2020). Major advantages of eDNA samples is that they are non-invasive and non-destructive sampling methods that have the capacity to detect the presence of species in the environment which otherwise would remain unnoticed, especially in aquatic (Carraro et al. 2018) and soil environments (Epp et al. 2012), but also in wildlife biology and biodiversity monitoring (Bohmann et al. 2014). These advances would not be possible without the vouchered specimens in NSCs that generated the DNA barcodes.

Together with the ongoing digitisation of NSC specimens and the growing body of digital specimen information, new techniques emerge that automate the extraction of morphological traits and measurements of size (especially for plants as herbarium vouchers are more easy to digitised than others NSC groups of organisms; Soltis 2017). These techniques include automated identification (Carranza-Rojas et al. 2017, Wäldchen and Mäder 2018, Wäldchen et al. 2018, Little et al. 2020), trait extraction (Corney et al. 2012, Ott et al. 2020, Weaver et al. 2020), long-term insect-plant interactions (Meineke et al. 2020) and phenological data (Goëau et al. 2020, Pearson et al. 2020). These advances transform biodiversity collections from merely physical specimens into suites of interconnected resources enriched through study over time (Page 2016, Nelson and Ellis 2018, Thiers et al. 2019, Lendemer et al. 2020). These interconnected resources extend biodiversity specimens to potentially limitless digital resources and additional physical preparations, e.g. tissue samples and DNA extractions (Lendemer et al. 2020). This concept was coined by Webster (2017) as the “extended specimen” and represents the next generation of NSCs (Schindel and Cook 2018). The extended specimen concept is further developed by Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN*8) in the US. Around the same time, within the DiSSCo aligned ICEDIG project (see Section 2), the concept of a Digital Specimen (DS) was developed (Hardisty et al. 2019). A DS is the representation of a digitised physical specimen and contains information about a single specimen with links to all derived supplementary information. Hardisty et al. (2019) propose a new openDS TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) standard that is a specification of a DS and other object types essential to mass digitisation of NSCs and their digital use. The openDS standard includes 1) the DS, 2) its storage container, 3) the collection it belongs to, 4) the organisation that houses the collection, and 5) interpretations of the specimen such as its determination of species, trait measurements, DNA sequence data, etc. The similarities between the extended specimen concept and openDS were recognized by all parties and has resulted in a ‘Letter of Intent for Collaboration - in a Global and Open Process - on Interoperable Enriched Specimen Information Model*9. Signatories of the letter express their intent to collaborate on converging the DS concept (initiated by DiSSCo) and Extended Specimen concept (initiated by BCoN) towards a global specification or, if differences in use cases require so, multiple specifications which are interoperable. Furthermore, signatories aim to collaborate in a global process, open to participation from all stakeholders, under the umbrella of the GBIF led ‘Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge’*10 and with stakeholders in the Earth Samples domain.

The richness of information captured by NSCs makes them stand out in quality and potential from human and machine observations on biodiversity in space and time shared through data portals like GBIF, and urge the need for mass digitisation of NSCs. The potential of NSCs by persistently linking all derived information to the physical specimens (from where the information was obtained), along with the recognition of the urgent need for mass digitisation of NSCs (Blagoderov et al. 2012) to support science, policy and society, is at the core of the new European research infrastructure – DiSSCo.

DiSSCo*6 – the Distributed System of Scientific Collections – is a new European Research Infrastructure (RI) for NSCs that entered the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) roadmap in 2018 in the environmental domain*11. The DiSSCo RI works for the digital unification of all European natural science assets under common curation and access policies and practices. These aim to make the data easily Findable, more Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, a.k.a. FAIR (Wilkinson et al. 2016). As such, the DiSSCo RI enables the transformation of a fragmented landscape of the NSCs into an integrated knowledge base that provides interconnected hard evidence on the natural world.

The DiSSCo consortium represents the largest ever formal agreement between Natural History Museums (NHMs), botanical gardens and collection-holding universities from Europe, currently representing 120 institutions from 21 countries. The DiSSCo consortium is still growing and open for new institutes to join by signing the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of DiSSCo. Collectively the DiSSCo consortium hosts 80% of the world's known bio- and geodiversity represented by the 1.5 billion specimens that are preserved in its NSCs. By bringing together NSCs institutions at this scale and combining earlier investments in data interoperability practices with technological advancements in digitization, cloud services and semantic linking of all derived data, DiSSCo makes all data from NSCs available as one virtual data cloud in association with a wide range of end-user services. These include finding data, accessing data, using data, and improving and updating data (Hardisty et al. 2020). DiSSCo connects historical NSC data with data emerging from new techniques including DNA barcodes, partial and whole genome sequences, proteomics and metabolomics data, chemical data, (morphological) trait data, phenological data and imaging data (Computer-assisted Tomography (CT), Synchrotron, etc.) to name but a few (See Section 1; Hardisty 2020).

Although the final product upon completion will be the deployment of the DiSSCo RI, at present DiSSCo is a programme of strategically aligned EU-funded projects with collaborations from relevant organisations, such as CETAF*12 (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities). CETAF represents the scientific institutions and community of experts that underpin the creation and further development of the DiSSCo RI. Furthermore, DiSSCo collaborates with the Catalogue of Life (CoL) through the CoL+ project*13 under the ‘Alliance of Biodiversity Knowledge’, led by GBIF (Hobern et al. 2019). All these projects and initiatives collectively contribute to the realisation of the DiSSCo RI (Fig. 1).

DiSSCo started in 2014 with the DiSSCo design study, which resulted in the submission of DiSSCo to the ESFRI roadmap where it was accepted in 2018*11. In the meanwhile, from 2018-2020 the EU-funded and aligned ICEDIG*14 – “Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage” – project was operational, and it delivered the conceptual design blueprint for the DiSSCo digitization infrastructure addressing the technical, financial, policy and governance aspects necessary to operate a large distributed initiative for natural sciences collections across Europe (Hardisty et al. 2020) as a key output. Under ICEDIG, also the first design and version of a Collection Digitisation Dashboard was developed (van Egmond et al. 2019) that provides collection descriptions with their level of digitisation of the collection holdings of all DiSSCo members. Knowledge on the content of institutional holdings provides more detailed information on the European collections and can drive prioritized digitisation through Digitisation-on-Demand (DoD) requests of specimens of particularly topical scientific or policy relevance.

During the same period, CoL and GBIF embarked on the CoL+ project which develops a new IT architecture to compile the most comprehensive and authoritative global index of species currently available, and which is going to serve as the backbone taxonomy for GBIF, DiSSCo, and others, among which the EEA.

In 2019, the SYNTHESYS+*15 project entered the fourth and final iteration of the “Synthesis of systematic resources” (SYNTHESYS) programme. A core element in SYNTHESYS is to provide funded researcher visits (Access), both physical and virtual, to the specimens housed by SYNTHESYS institutions. Alongside 'Access', Joint Research Activities (JRA) aim to improve the quality of, and increase access to, collections and data within natural history institutions by developing digital collections. Many activities under SYNTHESYS+ contribute to the development of infrastructural components of the DiSSCo RI, notably the European Loans and Visits System*16 (ELViS), the European Curation and Annotation System (ECAS) and the further development of Collection Digitisation Dashboards (piloted under ICEDIG) led by CETAF in collaboration with the TDWG Collection Description*17 (CD) group. To emphasize collaboration and alignment, SYNTHESYS+ has a strong focus on networking activities (NA) through which organizations like CETAF, GBIF, TDWG and GGBN*18 (Global Genome Biodiversity Network) lead specific actions towards the interoperability, alignment and embedment of efforts across Europe and beyond.

The next project under the DiSSCo programme is the MOBILISE*19 EU COST Action ‘Mobilising Data, Experts and Policies in Scientific Collections’, which is running from 2018-2022. The aim of MOBILISE is to build up a cooperative, inclusive, bottom-up and responsive network with active involvement of European stakeholders to support research for biodiversity and geo-diversity informatics, many of which represent DiSSCo members or future members. MOBILISE organizes events, workshops, short scientific missions and training to transfer knowledge and technology between researchers, domain specialists, data aggregators and industry. Furthermore, MOBILISE promotes the development of standards and best practices as well as innovative workflows and techniques to increase efficiency of large-scale collection digitisation and data mobilisation. Finally, MOBILISE raises awareness about the need that sustainable data access infrastructures are an integral component of biodiversity research.

After acceptance of DiSSCo on the ESFRI roadmap in 2018, the DiSSCo Prepare project*20 was submitted and got funded in 2019. DiSSCo Prepare runs from 2019-2023 and spans most of the preparatory phase of DiSSCo. DiSSCo Prepare builds on the 104 recommendations of the conceptual design blueprint for the DiSSCo digitisation infrastructure (Hardisty et al. 2020) from the ICEDIG project. DiSSCo Prepare has two main aims:

Raise DiSSCo’s Implementation readiness level (IRL) across the five dimensions of relevance as identified by the ICEDIG project, namely the technical, scientific, data, financial and organisational dimensions (Fig. 2). This will enhance DiSSCo’s ability to successfully execute the construction phase and effect related actions based on clear, actionable guidelines with minimum risks for the RI partners.

Under the aligned projects and in the initial phase of the DiSSCo Prepare project, major advances have been made regarding a) the definition of digital specimens through the openDS standard (Hardisty et al. 2019), the equivalent of the extended specimen (Webster 2017, Lendemer et al. 2020), and b) the infrastructural requirements needed to serve the integrated information of digital specimens. Currently, explorations of the possibilities of a Digital Object Architecture (DOA), which offers a way of grouping, managing and processing fragments of information related to digital specimens, is in an advanced stage and included in the proposed openDS standard (Kahn and Wilensky 2006, Hardisty et al. 2019, Hardisty 2020). A first example of a simple digital specimen is depicted in the light-green-shaded box of Fig. 3 with links to all derived information. This particular specimen has a name represented by its name identifier from CoL, has its holotype deposited at the Natural History Museum of London, and has related sequence data stored in GenBank, etc. The rectangular darker green box illustrates how the digital specimen content could be serialized in JSON format for transfer between systems, as well as for application processing and entry into databases. Digital specimens are aggregations of widely distributed and heterogeneous data about biological and geological specimens. The use of the proposed DOA data model and components act as an approach to solving the challenges of offering adherence to the FAIR principles as an integral characteristic of data for biodiversity and geo-diversity sciences (Lannom et al. 2019). Furthermore, these efforts align with delivering FAIR compliant data and services into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC; European Commission 2018).

The European Environment Agency*21 (EEA) is an agency of the European Union whose core task is to provide sound, independent information on the environment. The EEA aims to support sustainable development by helping to achieve significant and measurable improvement in Europe's environment, through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information to policy making agents and the public. The EEA’s key goals are to be the prime source of environmental knowledge at European level, play a leading role in supporting long-term transition to a sustainable society, and to be a lead organisation for environmental knowledge-sharing and capacity-building (European Environment Agency 2015). Its mandate is twofold: a) to help the European community and its member and cooperating countries make informed decisions about improving the environment, integrating environmental considerations into economic policies and moving towards sustainability; and b) to coordinate the European environment information and observation network - Eionet.

This white paper serves the purpose to characterise DiSSCo and the EEA to facilitate mutual understanding and identify connections between the data portal Eionet and all its components and DiSSCo, an integrated knowledge base that provides interconnected hard evidence of the natural world. As DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanic gardens and collection-holding universities in the world, it is an ideal platform for transdisciplinary interaction and dialogue that can provide input to the European community to make informed decisions about improving the environment, integrating environmental considerations into economic policies and moving towards sustainability. DiSSCo’s goals and vision also should align with broader regional and global strategic initiatives such as the recently published European Biodiversity Strategy 2030 (European Commission 2020), which has defined a number of specific commitments and actions to be delivered by 2030, including:

Establishing a larger EU-wide network of protected areas on land and at sea, building upon existing Natura 2000 areas, with strict protection for areas of very high biodiversity and climate value.

DiSSCo, at its present level of maturity, has to make design and infrastructural decisions to facilitate the data infrastructure where all information generated through mass-digitisation of the European NSCs will be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). As DiSSCo is still in the preparatory phase, modifications and adjustments to the infrastructural design are still possible to assure that the future needs of the European environmental policy domain are accommodated. Below we provide examples for a number of scientific domains with high policy relevance to the EEA. By providing these examples we aim to open further discussions and identify additional use cases of the DiSSCo infrastructure that can support the aims of the European Union set out in the European Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and its environmental policy.

SEBI 001 Abundance and distribution of selected European species: Trends in bird and butterfly populations from 1990-2017 <https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/abundance-and-distribution-of-selected-species-8/assessment-1>