The EU 2020 Strategy aims to create smart, sustainable and inclusive growth designed to develop a high employment economy, while addressing major environmental challenges, including biodiversity loss. The message that green economy is an important area for job growth has been reiterated in various EC initiatives. The 2012 ‘EU biodiversity objectives and the labour market’ report points out that mapping skills shortages and training needs in biodiversity-related employment has only just begun in some Member States. A more strategic approach to training opportunities is needed. The report sees important potential benefits for the labour market with a good number of higher-skilled, knowledge-intensive jobs required to meet the EU biodiversity targets. The Convention on Biological Diversity considers the need that people become fully aware by 2020 of the value of biodiversity by integrating awareness and understanding of biodiversity and its values into national educational curricula, taking into account approaches related to Education for Sustainable Development. Based on these priorities, BIOTALENT developed an innovative blended e-learning biodiversity training programme. The right training and capacity building need to be provided today to improve competences of teachers, educators and other professionals in the sector and to improve quality of biodiversity education, effective at raising the level of biodiversity literacy for teachers and students, motivating them to learn about biodiversity and to engage in conserving Europe’s biodiversity. Educators who are innovative and who can make the difference are needed to attract young students to Science studies/careers or to STEM at large. BIOTALENT achieved its objectives by developing:- an open source e-learning platform to deliver e-learning courses;- a pilot blended course on biodiversity and climate change that trained learners and provided them with a certificate;- a customisable blended learning model, transferable to the wider sector of STEM and other disciplines;- a tutor guide supporting tutors, project partners and other users to be competent in the use of blended and e-learning techniques. The blended e-learning course specifically targeted biology teachers and trainee teachers from secondary education and educators in science museums, botanical gardens, science centres and nature organisations. Other professionals such as biologists, rangers and conservation managers seeking to improve their competences on the topic also benefited from the course. The course was also of relevance to young unemployed professionals of the above mentioned categories to provide them with the necessary competences to be successful in finding employment or to improve their position in the labour market. In addition, the course was open to anyone interested in the topic wanting to partake in continuing professional development. The e-learning platform integrated innovative services having a great potential in learning and educational context. Practicing an inquiry based learning approach and using effective multimedia to deliver learning experiences that mirror real-world practices, let learners apply the content in various professional contexts. BIOTALENT offered learners a unique transnational access to a range of facilities and expertise present in the Partnership hardly found jointly elsewhere. No less important than the scientific knowledge gained by the blended e-learning course is that participants greatly enhanced their ICT skills through the use of various internet technologies available on the e-learning platform. The e-learning programme equipped the BIOTALENT learners with new skills and knowledge that will improve the quality of their teaching or other professional activities in the sector and that will support them in finding career opportunities in education, science-related business or industries and/or to improve their position in their organisation or in the labour market. The project’s success -nearly 500 learners enrolled- and the delivery of a high quality e-learning programme relied upon the expertise and resources brought to the Strategic Partnership by each Partner. BIOTALENT involved 5 Partners coming from 4 countries (Belgium, Hungary, Portugal, Greece). The Partners are 3 Non-Profit making cultural organisations (museums), 1 Higher education institution (university associated museum) and 1 Consortium of EU taxonomic facilities. The BIOTALENT training programme and the customisable learning model remain available open access on the e-learning platform. The model can be tailored to the needs of others and transferred to new areas. The project scientific and pedagogical approach can be applied to new project ideas in the field of Science education and in the wider sector of STEM. An important continuation is that the e-learning programme will be integrated into a European and international framework for training and e-learning.

Modern science requires digital access to data. European collections account for 55% of the natural sciences collections globally, holding more than 1 billion objects, which represent 80% of the world’s bio- and geo-diversity. Only around 10% of these have been digitally catalogued and 1-2% imaged, rendering their information underused. The sheer scale and complexity of digitising and providing access to this information requires technological, socio-cultural, and organisational capacity enhancements across the continent. This challenge is being tackled by the new ESFRI initiative Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo). DiSSCo will unify access to collection data in a harmonised and integrated manner across Europe. It will enable critical new insights from integrated digital data to address some of the world's greatest challenges, such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. However, new research and technological innovation will be required to solve the challenges of efficiently digitising and seamlessly accessing the collections. Building on previous project outputs, community and industrial expertise, the ICEDIG project will design all the technical, financial, policy and governance aspects for developing and operating DiSSCo. A consolidation stream will develop a shared governance model to support all aspects of service unification such as implementation of the open access principles, incentive schemes, planning and prioritisation, capacity development, etc. A technology stream will focus on the innovations that will be required to digitise a significant part of major collections in a foreseeable time, at acceptable cost, and to manage petabyte-size data. The work will be carried out in wide consultation with the larger community. The outputs will be prototypes, blueprints, novel workflows, new industry partnerships, and citizen involvement models, paving the way for the successful construction of the DiSSCo research infrastructure.

BiCIKL is a proposal that 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 at (1) each separate stage of, and (2) along 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 (specimens, material citations, samples, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables) extracted from literature. BiCIKL will provide for the first time access and tools for seamless linking and usage tracking of data along the line: specimens → sequences → species → analytics → publications → biodiversity knowledge graph → re-use.

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative. DiSSCo aims to bring together natural science collections from 175 museums, botanical gardens, universities and research institutes across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that makes these collections physically and digitally open and accessible for all forms of research and innovation. DiSSCo RI entered the ESFRI roadmap in 2018 and successfully concluded its Preparatory Phase in early 2023. The RI is now transitioning towards the constitution of its legal entity (an ERIC) and the start of its scaled-up construction (implementation) programme. The primary goal of the DiSSCo Transition Project is to ensure the seamless transition of the DiSSCo RI from its Preparatory Phase to the Construction Phase (expected to start in 2025). In this transition period, the Project will address five objectives building on the outcomes of the Preparatory Phase project: 1) Advance the DiSSCo ERIC process and complete its policy framework, ensuring the smooth early-phase Implementation of DISSCo; 2) Engage & support DiSSCo National Nodes to strengthen national commitments; 3) Advance the development of core e-services to avoid the accumulation of technical debt before the start of the Implementation Phase; 4) Continue international collaboration on standards & best practices needed for the DiSSCo service provision; and 5) Continue supporting DiSSCo RI interim governance bodies and transition them to the DiSSCo ERIC formal governance. The Project’s impact will be measured against the increase in the RI's overall Implementation Readiness Level (IRL). More specifically, we will monitor its impact towards reaching the required level of maturity in four of the five dimensions of the IRL that can benefit from further developments. These include the organisational, financial, technological and data readiness levels.

Accurate taxonomic knowledge and tools are needed to understand the drivers and impact of biodiversity decline. However, the field of taxonomy is severely hampered by a continuous decrease in capacity. With TETTRIs, we envision a transformative change in the field of taxonomy to build and sustain taxonomic research capacity through increasing knowledge and developing systems. TETTRIs will achieve this aim by creating joint knowledge in reference collections, training frameworks, and with innovative tools as well as by developing centralized resources providing access to an expertise marketplace, the taxonomic knowledge platform, and career paths. The core methodology for reaching these objectives includes co-creation with citizen scientists, and professionals in biodiversity hotspots. The open-access knowledge and systems built into TETTRIs, together with citizen scientists, will accelerate the integration and expansion of taxonomy in education, governance, and multidisciplinary research. This will ensure the long-term relevance of taxonomy as an instrumental science, necessary to halt European and global biodiversity loss, and ensuring ecosystems and their services are preserved and sustainably restored on land, inland water and at sea. TETTRIs builds taxonomic research capacity near biodiversity hotspots by networking natural history museums and other taxonomic facilities through bottom-up co-creation between 17 partners. The consortium includes the European Citizen Science Association and several of Europe's leading natural history museums, botanic gardens and universities unified under CETAF, the leading European voice for taxonomy and systematic biology. Impact throughout the EU and beyond is secured through involvement of associated initiatives such as DiSSCo and DEST, partners in third party projects, and key TETTRIs dissemination activities towards a new generation of taxonomists, citizen scientists, users in need of taxonomic knowledge, and decision makers