At the closing event of TETTRIs, held from 27 to 29 April 2026 at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, CETAF Executive Director Ana Casino reflected on the project’s impact on Europe’s taxonomic community. In this interview, she highlights how TETTRIs strengthened collaboration among natural history museums and botanical gardens, fostered trust across the community, and demonstrated the capacity of taxonomy institutions to deliver meaningful results for science, policy, and society.
How relevant and important has the TETTRIs project been for CETAF?
TETTRIs is a project that, for CETAF, our community, is the flagship. It’s the first time ever that the community coordinates and leads a project in Europe, a project that specifically talks about taxonomy. And I really think that is the best success that we could ever think of.
I really think that, for the first time, there was a call addressing the lack of taxonomists, the need for taxonomic capacity in Europe, and there it was set up.
So, I really think that TETTRIs came at the right moment to strengthen our community and to really say: “Here we are, we can do a lot, we are able to do this.”
Now that we have closed the project with this final event here in Brussels, what is your assessment of these three days?
I think the TETTRIs final event has showcased one of the most important things for CETAF and for the natural history museums and botanical gardens in Europe in general, which is that we are trusted facilities, but we also have trust in ourselves.
The community has come together, the people know each other very well, and they have been able to work collaboratively without any competition. And this is a success. The community cannot work together without trusting each other, without thinking that they are complementary, that they are not competitors, that they can do better things together than alone.
And I think that TETTRIs showcases exactly that sense, that spirit of a community, that we can do things together. And we have seen, with all the deliverables and all the tools, systems, and things that we have created, how far we can get when we work together.
And this is clearly something that we should be proud of. TETTRIs is quite a rewarding process, and we should be proud of what we have achieved as a community.
What does the future hold after TETTRIs?
The future in the short term is TETTRIX. TETTRIX is the consolidation. We want to go from piloting to practical things, from ideas and concepts to real applications, to put things hands-on and see how we can make a much more robust taxonomic practice.
But there are a lot of things to do beyond that because we have proven to many stakeholders that we can do and deliver what we promise.
And therefore, I really think that — and we have heard during the TETTRIs final event, through the panels and through the representatives of the different DGs, Directorates-General at the European Commission — they are expecting a lot of contributions from the taxonomic community.
And we should be able to gather all these requirements, all these needs, not only from policymakers, but also from stakeholders like the private sector, academia, et cetera, so that we are able and capable of delivering the data at the state, level of granularity, and format that they can use impactfully.
Ana Casino: “TETTRIs came at the right moment to strengthen our community and to really say: ‘Here we are, we can do a lot. We are able to do this.’”
More information, including the full programme and detailed speaker profiles, is available here.