The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) joins GBIF as the latest non-country Participant in the network.
Representing the largest-ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanical gardens and collection-holding universities, DiSSCo is a new European research infrastructure that aims to unify natural science assets under common curation and access policies and practices. The DiSSCo network currently includes 119 participating institutions from 21 countries that together hold more than 1.5 billion specimens.
"The DiSSCo Research Infrastructure is delighted to become an active member of the GBIF family", said Dimitris Koureas, coordinator of DiSSCo. “As European consortium of natural science collections, DiSSCo will underpin GBIF's mission with a validated evidence base consisting of up to 1.5 billion digital objects.”
Like GBIF, DiSSCo embraces open data to ensure that mass-scale digitization of specimens of European collections mobilizes data that is FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
"The GBIF Secretariat is excited to welcome DiSSCo as a formal member of the GBIF network," said Joe Miller, executive secretary of GBIF. "We are already working closely together on projects like the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ and the newly awarded DiSSCo Prepare, and this step solidifies our close relationship."
Created in 2015, DiSSCo has its roots in Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), another long-time member of the GBIF network. Members of both networks collaborate frequently, including current project activities like SYNTHESYS+ and Catalogue of Life Plus (CoL+).
Working alongside iDigBio, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), and LifeWatch ERIC (all fellow GBIF associate participants), DiSSCo and GBIF are jointly presenting the Biodiversity_Next conference, hosted by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and NLBIF in Leiden, the Netherlands, in October 2019.