The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative. DiSSCo aims to bring together natural science collections from 175 museums, botanical gardens, universities and research institutes 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 RI entered the ESFRI roadmap in 2018 and successfully concluded its Preparatory Phase in early 2023. The RI is now transitioning towards the constitution of its legal entity (an ERIC) and the start of its scaled-up construction (implementation) programme. The primary goal of the DiSSCo Transition Project is to ensure the seamless transition of the DiSSCo RI from its Preparatory Phase to the Construction Phase (expected to start in 2025). In this transition period, the Project will address five objectives building on the outcomes of the Preparatory Phase project: 1) Advance the DiSSCo ERIC process and complete its policy framework, ensuring the smooth early-phase Implementation of DISSCo; 2) Engage & support DiSSCo National Nodes to strengthen national commitments; 3) Advance the development of core e-services to avoid the accumulation of technical debt before the start of the Implementation Phase; 4) Continue international collaboration on standards & best practices needed for the DiSSCo service provision; and 5) Continue supporting DiSSCo RI interim governance bodies and transition them to the DiSSCo ERIC formal governance. The Project’s impact will be measured against the increase in the RI's overall Implementation Readiness Level (IRL). More specifically, we will monitor its impact towards reaching the required level of maturity in four of the five dimensions of the IRL that can benefit from further developments. These include the organisational, financial, technological and data readiness levels.

European natural history collections are a critical infrastructure for meeting the most important challenge humans face over the next 30 years – mapping a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend – and for answering fundamental scientific questions about ecological, evolutionary, and geological processes. Since 2004 SYNTHESYS has been an essential instrument supporting this community, underpinning new ways to access and exploit collections, harmonising policy and providing significant new insights for thousands of researchers, while fostering the development of new approaches to face urgent societal challenges. SYNTHESYS+ is a fourth iteration of this programme, and represents a step change in evolution of this community. For the first time SYNTHESYS+ brings together the European branches of the global natural science organisations (GBIF, TDWG, GGBN and CETAF) with an unprecedented number of collections, to integrate, innovate and internationalise our efforts within the global scientific collections community. Major new developments addressed by SYNTHESYS+ include the delivery of a new virtual access programme, providing digitisation on demand services to a significantly expanded user community; the construction of a European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) providing, for the first time, a unified gateway to accessing digital, physical and molecular collections; and a new data processing platform (the Specimen Data Refinery), applying cutting edge artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the digital mobilisation of natural history collections. The activities of SYNTHESYS+ form a critical dependency for DiSSCo - the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, which is the European collection communities ESFRI initiative. DiSSCo will undertake the maintenance and sustainability of SYNTHESYS+ products at the end of the programme.

The Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) ProjectThe Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) Project has the overriding aim of accelerating the application of genomic science to enhance understanding of biodiversity, monitor biodiversity change, and guide interventions to address its decline. BGE coordinates and upscales DNA barcoding and reference genome generation in the context of European biodiversity. The Project develops synergies by aligning efforts and resources of the DNA barcoding and genome sequencing communities across the continent. The BGE objectives with derived ambitions: CAPACITY: To establish functioning biodiversity genomics networks at the European level to connect and grow community capacity to use genomic tools to help tackle the biodiversity crisis With the ambition to (a) Future-proof our networks on biodiversity genomics research, (b) lower access thresholds to biodiversity genomics research, and (c) promote co-creation and citizen engagement. PRODUCTION - To establish and implement large-scale biodiversity genomic data-generating pipelines for Europe to accelerate the production and accessibility of genomic data for biodiversity characterisation, conservation and biomonitoring With the ambition to (a) establish distributed and inclusive capacity, (b) build economies of scale and (c) connect previously disjoined resources to deliver relevant knowledge. APPLICATION - To apply genomic tools to enhance understanding of pan-European biodiversity and biodiversity declines to improve the efficacy of management interventions and biomonitoring programmes. With the ambition to (a) improve the use of biodiversity genomics data in science policy and (b) establish European-wide large scale biodiversity genomics research mechanisms. The BGE Consortium is comprised of 33 partners across 20 countries and brings together, for the first time at this scale, the two communities for barcoding and reference genome to implement its aspirational programme.

The project Past-to-Future (P2F) aims at radically advancing our knowledge of past climatic conditions to better understand Earth’s climate response to different kinds of forcing, with considerable focus on potential abrupt climatic transitions and the crossing of tipping points. To this end, P2F will integrate information from paleoenvironmental proxy data, from Earth system models (ESMs), and from rigorous theoretical approaches. Being able to reconstruct past climate evolution is a necessary step for enhancing our capacity to look into the future and, therefore, extensive improvements of state-of-the-art ESMs are needed. So far, ESMs are mainly calibrated and validated with respect to the instrumental records of the last ~170 years of relatively stable climate, while the Earth’s longer-term history is characterised by an interplay of gradual climate change, variability and critical transitions between competing states, with profound impacts on climate subsystems, ecosystems, and civilisations. Understanding the leading dynamical processes and feedbacks and in particular improving our ability to model and anticipate critical transitions in the climate and ecosystems is key to project future climate change on spatio-temporal scales relevant for societies, ecosystems and the planet. In this context, P2F will critically advance our ability to understand and anticipate the main climatic and societal impacts of the ongoing climate crisis. Specifically, P2F will extend the reach of Earth System Models and demonstrate a step change in the model development cycle of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), by providing fully paleo-informed models for future projection and producing a portfolio of plausible future climate change scenarios that are constrained by documented past climate changes and abrupt transitions. Finally, P2F will efficiently disseminate research outputs and engage key stakeholders in dialogue to ensure appropriate synergies are at attained.

Modern science requires digital access to data. European collections account for 55% of the natural sciences collections globally, holding more than 1 billion objects, which represent 80% of the world’s bio- and geo-diversity. Only around 10% of these have been digitally catalogued and 1-2% imaged, rendering their information underused. The sheer scale and complexity of digitising and providing access to this information requires technological, socio-cultural, and organisational capacity enhancements across the continent. This challenge is being tackled by the new ESFRI initiative Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo). DiSSCo will unify access to collection data in a harmonised and integrated manner across Europe. It will enable critical new insights from integrated digital data to address some of the world's greatest challenges, such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. However, new research and technological innovation will be required to solve the challenges of efficiently digitising and seamlessly accessing the collections. Building on previous project outputs, community and industrial expertise, the ICEDIG project will design all the technical, financial, policy and governance aspects for developing and operating DiSSCo. A consolidation stream will develop a shared governance model to support all aspects of service unification such as implementation of the open access principles, incentive schemes, planning and prioritisation, capacity development, etc. A technology stream will focus on the innovations that will be required to digitise a significant part of major collections in a foreseeable time, at acceptable cost, and to manage petabyte-size data. The work will be carried out in wide consultation with the larger community. The outputs will be prototypes, blueprints, novel workflows, new industry partnerships, and citizen involvement models, paving the way for the successful construction of the DiSSCo research infrastructure.