Europe's museums and universities hold over 1 billion natural history specimens — rocks, plants, insects, fossils — but only about 10% are even listed in a database, and barely 1-2% have been photographed. Imagine a giant library where 90% of the books aren't in the catalogue. ICEDIG designed the technology, workflows, and robotics needed to digitise these collections at industrial scale, including a dashboard to track progress and cloud storage solutions. The goal is to make all this biodiversity data searchable and usable, the same way Google made the web's information accessible.
Europe holds over 1 billion natural history specimens — but 90% aren't even catalogued digitally and 98-99% haven't been imaged. This makes critical biodiversity and climate data effectively invisible to researchers, businesses, and policymakers. Manual digitisation is too slow and expensive to tackle this backlog, creating demand for automated, industrial-scale solutions.
ICEDIG produced 35 deliverables including: robotics specifications for automated handling of biological collections, a tested infrastructure design for petabyte-scale data storage on Zenodo, and a tested design for an online dashboard tracking digitisation progress across European collections. These are blueprints and validated prototypes for building the DiSSCo pan-European research infrastructure.
If you are a robotics company looking for new verticals beyond manufacturing — this project developed specifications for robots that can handle and photograph delicate biological specimens at scale. With over 1 billion objects needing digitisation across Europe and only 1-2% currently imaged, this is a massive untapped market for automated handling and imaging solutions.
If you are a data storage company dealing with clients who need petabyte-scale archival solutions — this project tested Zenodo infrastructure for storing large-scale digitised biodiversity data and produced recommendations on features, capacities, and costs. With 1 billion objects to digitise, the resulting datasets will be enormous, requiring specialised storage and retrieval services.
If you are an environmental consultancy that needs reliable biodiversity reference data for impact assessments — this project is building the unified digital access point (DiSSCo) for 55% of the world's natural science collections. Once operational, this means faster, more comprehensive species identification and distribution data for your client reports.
ICEDIG was a publicly funded Research and Innovation Action (EUR 2,999,755). The outputs — blueprints, workflow designs, and specifications — are intended to be open access. However, building actual digitisation hardware based on their robotics specifications would require separate investment.
The project was specifically designed to solve the scale problem — how to digitise a significant part of 1 billion objects in a foreseeable time at acceptable cost. The robotics specifications and workflow designs target mass-processing, not one-at-a-time manual digitisation. However, full industrial deployment depends on the follow-up DiSSCo construction phase.
As an EU-funded RIA project, results are generally open access. The robotics specifications, dashboard designs, and infrastructure blueprints are meant to enable further development by industry partners. Companies can build commercial products based on these publicly available specifications.
The project delivered a tested design for an online visualisation tool showing digitisation progress across European collections. Based on available project data, this is a validated design rather than a production-ready product — it would need engineering work to become a deployable service.
ICEDIG (ended March 2020) was the design phase for DiSSCo, a new ESFRI research infrastructure. Based on available project data, the construction phase follows separately. ESFRI infrastructure projects typically take 5-10 years from design to full operation.
The consortium includes 2 industry partners and 2 SMEs out of 12 total partners across 7 countries. The robotics deliverable produced specifications for further pilot projects and R&D, indicating that commercial robotics partnerships are being actively developed but are not yet at production stage.
The ICEDIG consortium brings together 12 partners from 7 countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, UK), led by the University of Helsinki. The mix includes 4 universities, 3 research organisations, 2 industry players, and 3 other entities, with 2 SMEs in the group. The 17% industry ratio is modest, which is typical for an infrastructure design project — the heavier industry involvement is expected in the construction and operational phases. For a business looking to enter this space, the consortium represents the core European natural history network and the gateway to DiSSCo, the continent-wide research infrastructure being built on ICEDIG's blueprints.
Helsingin Yliopisto (University of Helsinki), Finland — reach out to the natural sciences digitisation team
Want to supply robotics, imaging, or data storage solutions for Europe's largest natural history digitisation programme? SciTransfer can connect you with the DiSSCo network and help position your technology.
