Speaking during the final event of TETTRIs at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (27–29 April 2026), Edwin van Huis reflected on the importance of collaboration, European funding, and community-building for the future of taxonomy. In this interview, the CETAF President explains how TETTRIs helped strengthen connections across Europe’s taxonomic community and why taxonomy is increasingly becoming relevant beyond scientific circles, including for policy and industry.
How significant has TETTRIs been for CETAF?
TETTRIs is very important for CETAF in two ways. It’s about the development of taxonomy, the future of taxonomy. So that’s obviously the core of our business, so it’s very important, and I think it’s been quite successful.
But what I’ve also seen in the project is that the community comes together, that suddenly this community of taxonomists from all these different countries in Europe works together and shares ideas. And I had not realised before how important that is, because people work in an institute and that’s usually where they work, and they hardly ever go out to meet colleagues and develop new ideas together or new ways of working, and these projects do that.
So maybe that part is even more important than the development of taxonomy.
How can institutions and funding programmes help strengthen taxonomy and raise awareness of its importance?
If you work in a field like taxonomy, it is very important that you are aware that you are part of a community, that there are other people working there, maybe on the same subject, maybe on different subjects.
And it’s difficult if institutions have to organise that themselves. They usually can’t. So funding, European funding, bringing people together, institutes taking part in these programmes, bringing people together — it’s not just about getting the project done or the job done, it’s also about opening up a world for your curators and your scientists to go out and talk to colleagues and get all these new insights and information.
So for institutes, being part of Europe, being part of these schemes, is much more important than the project itself. It’s being part of this European community that really enriches the people in your institute, makes them better scientists.
And I think that is the one goal that CETAF has reached in being part of so many of these projects, and also the satellite projects that TETTRIx has initiated: bringing all these people together. I think that is wonderful.
Do you think taxonomy is becoming part of a broader public and institutional conversation?
I think that taxonomy was something that was spoken about only between taxonomists. Even the word was only used between taxonomists.
And now you see that people are starting to realise that taxonomy is important for policy, important for companies, important for everything that’s happening in the world right now, and suddenly it becomes something bigger. Projects like this do this.
I think TETTRIx, the new project, is going to do that even more because it will look at how we can be part of the development of policy, how we can be part of company reporting, so it becomes mainstream.
And maybe the word taxonomy will not become mainstream, but the notion of taxonomy — understanding the natural world, understanding the world of species — is going to be mainstream.
Edwin van Huis: “People are starting to realise that taxonomy is important for policy, for companies, and for everything that’s happening in the world right now. […] Understanding the world of species is going to be mainstream.”