We have had amazing news! On Friday the 29th of June 2018 the news that DiSSCo has been officially accepted on the ESFRI roadmap came through. After almost three years of hard work across the continent, European Natural Science Collections are now recognised as a priority Research Infrastructure, supporting scientific excellence and innovation towards urgent societal challenges. This decision highlights how the DiSSCo vision, to bring together European natural science collections into one coherent virtual institution, is highly relevant and urgent for the European Research Area.
An amazing collaboration of experts and organisations have been working very hard to achieve this accomplishment. We owe a great gratitude to the DiSSCo consortium of 115 organisations across 21 countries, the directors of museums, botanical gardens, our CETAF consortium and everyone in the community of biodiversity data that shares our vision.
As DiSSCo now enters the ESFRI preparatory phase, we move ahead with setting up relevant working groups to further refine scientific needs, technical components and the overall service and data architecture. We continue expanding the consortium beyond the 21 countries and our systematic approach in attracting national level funding for our nodes.
This is a big milestone decision for European collections, the start of an exciting journey to position European collections at the heart of data-intensive science for biodiversity and geodiversity discovery.