European natural history collections play a critical role in mapping a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend. Since 2004 the EC funded SYNTHESYS programme has been supporting this community, underpinning new ways to access and exploit natural science collections, harmonising collections policy and funding collections-based research for more than 4000 scientists.

SYNTHESYS+ is the fourth iteration of this programme, running from February 2019 to January 2023.  This growing collection of articles highlights major outputs from SYNTHESYS+ over the four year of activity, covering topics such as our new digitisation on-demand service, the construction of a European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) and a new data processing platform (the Specimen Data Refinery), applying artificial intelligence to speed up the digital mobilisation of natural history collections.