CETAF participated in the inaugural edition of BioMonWeek, held in Montpellier from 4–8 May 2026. The European conference, dedicated to biodiversity monitoring and transnational cooperation across scales, brought together experts from science, policy, and business communities to exchange knowledge, strengthen networks, and advance coordinated action for biodiversity monitoring in Europe.
CETAF contributed to the session “Capacity needs and availability for species identification and naming”, highlighting TETTRIs-linked outcomes supporting capacity building for biodiversity monitoring.
The session focused on the essential role of accurate species identification and stable naming in biodiversity monitoring, research, and policy. Discussions addressed current capacity for species identification and taxonomy, highlighting critical gaps in expertise, training, and access to collections, reference materials, and digital tools. The session also explored how these capacity constraints affect data quality and monitoring outcomes, while identifying practical pathways to strengthen taxonomic expertise and support biodiversity knowledge and conservation action.
The programme featured presentations from several taxonomy-related initiatives, including:
- AI sound recognition for bats – MAMBO (Leonie Baier)
- Taxonomic expertise and coverage in Europe from literature – TETTRIs (Sofie Meeus)
- Training framework development – SoilMats (Edoardo Massa)
- Reference collections – ARCADE (Tatiana Moreira Pinhal)
The session was chaired by Sofie Meeus and Marko Lovric, Advocacy and Engagement Officer of CETAF.
TETTRIs has also been featured in the new CORDIS Results Pack “Innovative solutions for biodiversity monitoring”, which highlights European projects developing new and cost-effective approaches for biodiversity monitoring, including genomics-based methods and digital tools.
You can read the article on the CORDIS website.
You can learn more about the conference on the BioMonWeek website.
