Collections

Natural science collections are a treasure trove of data that are pivotal in finding solutions from and for nature; from conservation, health, minimising the degradation of natural capital and finding new sources of critical minerals, to addressing the challenges of food security, water scarcity and the impact of natural disasters.

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) that aims to digitally unify natural science collections - some 1.5 billion specimens - from 175 museums, botanical gardens, and universities across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that makes these collections physically and digitally open and accessible for all forms of research and innovation. DiSSCo’s preparatory phase ran from January 2020 to February 2023. This collection of articles highlights the major outputs of the DiSSCo Prepare project, which address five aspects of implementation readiness: the technical, scientific, data, organisational and financial readiness levels.

Natural science collections are a treasure trove of data that are pivotal in finding solutions from and for nature; from conservation, health, minimising the degradation of natural capital and finding new sources of critical minerals, to addressing the challenges of food security, water scarcity and ...

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites (i.e. aquatic fungi and fungi-like microorganisms) and the relation with their hosts in natural and industrial systems.

Zoosporic parasites cause severe host mortality, the economic impacts of parasitic diseases are notable in microalgae biotech industry, affecting production of food ingredients, biofuels, pharma- and nutraceuticals. But zoosporic parasites also constitute important drivers of natural populations, potentially influencing aquatic food webs and community dynamics, including maintaining and promoting diversity.

Main aim and objective of the Action is to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic Network connecting academia, industries and water management authorities to advance and apply knowledge and expertise on zoosporic parasites and the relation with their hosts in natural ecosystems and industrial algal biotech production.

The collection includes a range of different outputs and products, including the Grant Proposal (MoU), the Data Management Plan, the Action dissemination products, reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers.

This collection hosts outcomes and products from the COST Action CA20125 ParAqua "Applications for zoosporic parasites in aquatic ecosystems".

The Action is funded by the EU (2021-2024) and aims to organise and coordinate an innovative and dynamic European network connecting academia, industry an ...

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and metadata. FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) promise to provide the needed framework.

FAIR is about making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable both for humans and machines. FAIR digital objects have shown key capabilities to simplify and scale the use of data across domains, increase trust in data and ease the handling of high volumes of information. Now widespread consensus and collaboration is needed.

The 1st International Conference of FAIR Digital Objects brings together for the first time, key technical, scientific, industry, and science-policy stakeholders at this scale with the aim to boost the development and implementation of FDOs worldwide.

This conference collection explores two of the most urgent themes in constructing the FDO framework: research in structuring the knowledge domain and how to facilitate practical work, and practice in the design and building of FDO-consistent infrastructures.

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and meta ...

This collection hosts outcomes from B-GOOD, a Horizon 2020 project funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 817622). B-GOOD is a 5-year funded project (2018-2023) that integrates the knowledge and experience of researchers, beekeepers and a variety of stakeholders, and focuses on the provision of computationally-assisted decision making for sustainable beekeeping. By using a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, researchers within B-GOOD use data from within and around beehives to develop and test innovative tools to monitor colony health, as well as develop more efficient management practices. The collection includes a range of outputs, including reports, protocols, methodologies, and research papers.

This collection hosts outcomes from B-GOOD, a Horizon 2020 project funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 817622). B-GOOD is a 5-year funded project (2018-2023) that integrates the knowledge and experience of researchers, beekeepers and a ...

The BESTMAP RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the new modelling framework the project is developing. The project’s work focuses on supporting EU policy design and monitoring, by addressing the complexity of decisions made by farmers and the wider impact of agricultural policy on natural, social and cultural assets in rural areas of Europe.

This Collection will continue to be developed further as the BESTMAP project continues to promote a sustainable future for the agriculture sector in Europe.

The BESTMAP RIO Collection will host key outputs relating to the new modelling framework the project is developing. The project’s work focuses on supporting EU policy design and monitoring, by addressing the complexity of decisions made by farmers and the wider impact of agricultural policy on natur ...

Observations are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased, and lack integration in Europe. EuropaBON aims to bridge this gap by designing an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services. EuropaBON harnesses the power of modelling essential variables to integrate different reporting streams, data sources, and monitoring schemes. These essential variables provide consistent knowledge about multiple dimensions of biodiversity change across space and time. They can then be analyzed and synthesized to support decision-making at different spatial scales, from the sub-national to the European scale, through the production of indicators and scenarios. To develop essential biodiversity and ecosystem variables workflows that are policy relevant, EuropaBON is built around stakeholder engagement and knowledge exchange (WP2). EuropaBON will work with stakeholders to identify user and policy needs for biodiversity monitoring and investigate the feasibility of setting up a center to coordinate monitoring activities across Europe (WP2). Together with stakeholders, EuropaBON will assess current monitoring efforts to identify gaps, data and workflow bottlenecks, and analyse cost-effectiveness of different schemes (WP3). This will be used to co-design improved monitoring schemes using novel technologies to become more representative temporally, spatially and taxonomically, delivering multiple benefits to users and society (WP4). Finally, EuropaBON will demonstrate in a set of showcases how workflows tailored to the Birds Directive, Habitats Directive, Water Framework Directive, Climate and Restoration Policy, and the Bioeconomy Strategy, can be implemented (WP5).

Observations are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity ar ...

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science practices by providing access to data, tools and services at each stage of and along the entire biodiversity research life cycle (specimens, sequences, taxonomic names, analytics, publications, biodiversity knowledge graph).  

BiCIKL has a special emphasis on biodiversity literature and develops new methods and workflows for semantic publishing and integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, and re-using of sub-article-level data extracted from the published content. 

The main challenge of BiCIKL is to design, develop and implement a FAIR Data Place (FDP), a central tool for search, discovery and management of interlinked FAIR data across different domains. The key final outputs of BiCIKL is the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), a one-stop portal, providing access to the BiCIKL services, tools and workflows, beyond the lifetime of the project.

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science pr ...