The DiSSCo Bulgaria consortium makes the successful case for a national level project to mobilise and share, as FAIR data, a major part of the previously inaccessible information deriving from national natural science collections.

The EU funded project BiCKL unites different infrastructures (e.g ELIXIR, Lifewatch, DiSSCo), aggregators (e.g.GBIF), publishers and repositories (e.g. Pensoft, Zenodo) to develop a new approach/community that tackles unification of natural science collections data throughout its entire life cycle, from taxonomic description to publication.

Only 10% of collections hold worldwide has been digitized which leaves 90% of the valuable information inaccessible and reachable only by physical access.

Outputs produced by our European expert communities, for instance in the context of CETAF, are applied in concrete actions /changes in the DiSSCo Research Infrastructure services and tools, such as CETAF Stable Identifiers for collections specimens now embedded into DiSSCo's standardization practices.

Regardless whether you enter the bio- and geodiversity knowledge cloud from the perspective of specimens stored in DiSSCo, sequences stored in ENA/NCBI genbank, or phylogenies from publications, the fully integrated and FAIR data allows navigation from all perspectives. Such is the case, among others, for the spatial mapping of genes extracted from genbank that derive from specimens that were collected at a specific locality and time.

A researcher working on an invasive species distribution and biotic interactions, would be able to access through the DiSSCo's unique entry point, the sum total of data deriving from the specimens of that species, including deposited sequences, images and morphological traits.

Integrated collections-derived data and linked expertise is used by DiSSCo as a resource for the new European Biodiversity Knowledge Centre to support science-policy interface. This significantly reduces the overheads for the centre to develop separate operational links with hundreds of individual resources at the national level.

The digital twins of our physical specimens enable both human and machine readable and actionable knowledge to be integrated into larger models towards an eventual digital “replicate” of earth. Under the DiSSCo linked project SYNTHESYS+, a first Virtual Access call resulted in the selection of five projects for the digitization of 214K specimens across 15 institutions.

Among those services developed by DiSSCo (some are currently near completion and can be viewed as demonstrators): (a) the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS), a system for convenient online requests for virtual or physical access to collections; (b) Digitization on Demand, a peer reviewed prioritized system for requesting digitization; and (c) a collections directory and digitisation status dashboard.

In the context of DiSSCo, The Netherlands is developing its national collections infrastructure specialisation towards, among others, rapid species identification and bio-monitoring. This expertise will be shared across Europe, minimising duplication of investments in initial innovation by others.

The needs by DiSSCo for industrial scale digitisation, the digital transformation of institutions and large scale data services, combined with the uniqueness of the data it provides, will attract industry in developing novel products and services (AI applications, data storage, etc.) and vice versa. The multidisciplinarity and cross-domain collaborations inherent in DiSSCo's structure makes fertile ground for triggering innovation that would then be transferred to industry.

Together, DiSSCo Research Infrastructure and CETAF's community of experts have created a Task Force on COVID-19 to elaborate best practices, guidelines and promote standards in better identifying virus carriers and hosts to support multidisciplinary research and contribute to prevent future outbreaks.

DiSSCo through the CETAF community collaborates with ECSA in promoting citizen-science based initiatives that strengthen the linkage between research and society for the co-creation of science. The museums have a dedicated long-lasting history in training amateur taxonomists and building non-professional capacities for facilitating collection of observation data.

Through co-funded projects, DiSSCo establishes operational links to other domain-specific research infrastructures, such as ELIXIR, LifeWatch, E-RIHS, facilitating multidisciplinary research. ELIXIR and DiSSCo are working together to improve links between deposited sequence information (in ENA) and vouchered specimens (in museum collections).