The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for Natural Science Collections. The DiSSCo RI aims to create a new business model for one European collection that digitally unifies all European natural science assets under common access, curation, policies and practices that ensure that all the data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles).
A world-class research infrastructure
Many European environmental Research Infrastructures aim at aggregating, monitoring, analysing and modelling geo and bio-diversity information. The effectiveness of this effort, however, is based on the quality and availability of primary reference data that today is scattered and incomplete.
DiSSCo will fill a significant gap in the value chain of European RIs. As a pan-European research infrastructure of 130+ institutions in 21 countries, DiSSCo will act as a unified, single “European Natural History collection” providing unified access, discovery, interpretation and analysis services. In doing so, DiSSCo will transform today’s landscape of individual European NSCs providing simple access to various data classes into a new reality: a comprehensive and sustainable knowledge base of unprecedented scale that links all data classes across institutions with the precision required to enable research infrastructures tackle grand societal challenges.
DiSSCo will become fully operational by 2025.
Who'son board
Naturalis is heavily involved in moving DiSSCo forward, and currently implements a series of nationally and internationally funded projects linked to DiSSCo. We have a central role in DiSSCo as coordination partner; Naturalis director Edwin van Huis is chair of DiSSCo's interim General Assembly and Dimitris Koureas is Executive Director of DiSSCo. Aditionally, DiSSCo's Coordination and Support Office is hosted by Naturalis.
You can find all of the members of DiSSCo who work from Naturalis here