SYNTHESYS PLUS

Research Directions:

Marine biodiversity

Description:

Since 2004 SYNTHESYS has been an essential instrument supporting access and exploitation of European natural history collections, providing significant new insights for thousands of researchers, while fostering the development of new approaches to face urgent societal challenges. This project aims to bring together the European branches of the global natural science organisations (GBIF, TDWG, GGBN and CETAF) with the global scientific collections community. Major new developments include the delivery of a new virtual access programme, providing digitisation on demand services to a significantly expanded user community; the construction of a European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) will provide for the first time, a unified gateway to accessing digital, physical and molecular collections; and a new data processing platform (the Specimen Data Refinery), applying cutting edge artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the digital mobilisation of natural history collections. The activities of SYNTHESYS+ form a critical dependency for DiSSCo - the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, which is the European collection communities ESFRI initiative.