Photo credits: Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a soon-to-be new world-class Research Infrastructure for natural science collections.
DiSSCo works for the digital unification of European natural science assets under common curation, access, policies and practices, and aims to ensure that the data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
The valuable collections and expertise assembled through CETAF members in the last 20 years constitute a prized knowledge base on top of which DiSSCo Research Infrastructure is designed.
DiSSCo partners advocate for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and the monitoring of climate impact. They do by providing extensive access and services derived from species inventories such as floras, faunas, animals, plants, fungi, rocks, or genetic resources.
By representing a digital repository of natural science collections, DiSSCo aims to maximise the potential of natural sciences collections that are foundational to innovations worldwide, support breakthrough scientific discoveries and facilitate decision-making and legislative processes.