As Europe’s network of biological collections and the leading European voice for taxonomy and systematic biology, we lead and partner in projects where the outcomes can be of value to our community: developing resources, sharing good practices or applying our work to further research.
Projects listed here include those that were created by CETAF or where CETAF is a main partner in the project.
SYNTHESYS is a project creating an integrated European infrastructure for natural history collections. It is funded by the European Commission over multiple iterations, the latest of which began in February 2019. This fifth project, SYNTHESYS+, comprises 18 European natural history museums, universities, botanic gardens and research organisations. It aims to create an integrated European infrastructure for researchers in the natural sciences.
DiSSCo Prepare is a project developing a Construction Masterplan for the implementation of DiSSCo Research Infrastructure. The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class research infrastructure for natural science collections. It works for the digital unification of all European natural science assets under common curation and access policies and practices. These aim to make the data easily Findable, more Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). As such, DiSSCo enables the transformation of a fragmented landscape of the crucial natural science collections into an integrated knowledge base that provides interconnected hard evidence on the natural world.
MOBILISE produces a comprehensive knowledge framework for establishing bio- and geodiversity data as a crosscutting topic for many diverse nature-related domains. The project serves as a flexible, creative, and multidisciplinary hub for exchanging experiences and expertise. MOBILISE is creating a networking, consolidation and training platform, bringing together key actors on biodiversity data mobilisation and preparing the ground for solutions at European level.
BiCIKL will initiate and build a new European starting community of key research infrastructures, establishing open science practices in the domain of biodiversity through provision of access to data, associated tools and services throughout the entire research cycle. BiCIKL will provide new methods and workflows for an integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, accessing and re-using of sub-article-level data extracted from literature. The project will provide access and tools for seamless linking and usage tracking of data, for the first time.
The Red List of Taxonomists project brings together individual scientists, research institutions, and learned societies from across Europe, the project will compare the trends and pull up recommendations to overcoming the risks, preserving and further evolving the expert capacity of this scientific community. Unlike species extinctions, the loss of taxonomic knowledge is reversible, especially when the needs are clear and the necessary resources are invested in education, training, career development, and recognition.
Previous projects
