SPECIES 2000

Their core work

Species 2000 maintains the Catalogue of Life — the world's most comprehensive and authoritative index of known species, integrating taxonomic checklists from specialist databases worldwide into a single, consistent species name authority. In practice, their core function is ensuring that different biodiversity databases, genomic repositories, literature archives, and natural history collections can reference the same species using agreed, validated names. In EU research projects, they act as the taxonomic backbone provider: a specialist data authority that large biodiversity informatics consortia rely on for name resolution and interoperability. Their value is not in conducting field research but in making the entire biodiversity knowledge system machine-readable and self-consistent.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their early H2020 engagement centred on the physical and digital infrastructure challenge: making natural science collections — museum specimens, herbarium sheets, geological samples — findable and interoperable across European institutions (DiSSCo Prepare, 2020). By 2021, the focus visibly shifted toward semantic technologies: linked open data, knowledge graphs, taxon name resolution, and connecting genomics, literature, and collections into a unified, machine-readable knowledge layer (BiCIKL). The direction of travel is from "digitise and share collections" toward "build the semantic web of biodiversity knowledge," with taxonomic name authority as the connecting thread throughout.

Species 2000 is moving from enabling access to physical collections toward building the taxonomic backbone of a machine-readable global biodiversity web — making them increasingly relevant to any consortium where data interoperability and open science are central requirements.

How they like to work

Species 2000 has participated in both H2020 projects as a consortium partner, never as coordinator, which accurately reflects their role as an indispensable specialist data authority rather than a project orchestrator. Despite this supporting role, they have engaged with 40 unique partners across 22 countries through just two projects — a sign that large, internationally distributed consortia actively seek them out for their unique taxonomic assets. Consortium builders should expect a focused, well-defined contribution (taxon name resolution, species list integration, linked data provision) rather than broad project management involvement.

Through only two projects, Species 2000 has connected with 40 unique consortium partners spanning 22 countries, reflecting the inherently global character of biodiversity informatics and the broad demand for their taxonomic authority services. Their network reaches well beyond Europe, consistent with the worldwide scope of the Catalogue of Life.

What sets them apart

Species 2000 holds a position that no general research institute can replicate: they are the custodians of the Catalogue of Life, the de facto global standard for species name authority, built on decades of community trust and data curation that cannot be quickly reproduced. Any consortium working with biological, ecological, genomic, or collections data that requires species name consistency across databases has a strong structural reason to include Species 2000 — they are the entity that makes multi-source biodiversity data interoperable. Their small size as an NGO contrasts with the outsized infrastructural role they play: they are a precision instrument, not a generalist partner.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BiCIKL
  The largest funded project (EUR 238,625 EC contribution), BiCIKL integrates genomics, literature, and natural history collections into a linked open data knowledge library — the clearest demonstration of Species 2000's role at the intersection of taxonomy and semantic web infrastructure.
• DiSSCo Prepare
  Participation in the preparatory phase of DiSSCo — one of Europe's most ambitious research infrastructure initiatives for natural history digitisation — placed Species 2000 at the foundation of continent-wide scientific collections access from the outset.