Vision

Highly urgent priorities are to: 

• return the biosystematic value of the specimens to the scientific gold standard – a standard of higher intrinsic information value than the previous purely phenotypic standard – and thus keep the collections fully active in the service of current research goals:  e.g., Assembling the Tree of Life, Biodiversity Assessment / Gene Space, Facilitating Scientific Progress;
• prevent severe damage to the usefulness of worldwide biological information databases that would be done by prolonged uncertainty and differences of opinion about name application;
• provide a method for high quality future organism identifications in preparation for an imminently arriving time when today’s classical morphotaxonomic experts are no longer available for consultation, while still tapping the existing expertise of these people to the maximum degree possible during the building-up of the new system;
• make an orderly collection of the DNA extracted for barcoding purposes in a state-of-the-art facility in order to make it available for verification and further genomic/ genespace exploration.

This infrastructure of barcodes would also facilitate a number of research opportunities consistent with the research themes of Building the Databases of Life, as updated to address current EU and international concerns and priorities.  It would:

• allow species identification in the areas of collection strength to be extended to types of specimens, e.g., larvae, small forensic tissue fragments, and sterile plant material, that heretofore have never been amendable to identification, and
• allow the signature “barcode” genes of organisms to be a focus for the organization of all other genomic information obtained for the same organisms, with the effect that the immense “genespace” represented by European collections can begin to be mapped and exploited in an organized way compatible with current databases,
• allow each organism barcoded to be connected to the emerging Tree of Life via the barcode loci, tremendously accelerating the progress of ATOL and ensuring that European information connected to it remains primary and influential, rather than secondary and incidental, so that the European collections also retain or improve their world standing
• greatly facilitate all practical projects requiring rapid and objective organism identification by providing basic information that can be used not only in routine molecular barcode identification, but also in micro- and macroarrays; these would often be based on oligonucleotides extracted by special software from the basic infrastructure of barcodes
• in connection with the preceding, greatly facilitate organism community analysis, allowing barcoded species to be used as bioindicators in terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats for a wide range of disturbances / stressors, in situations where morphology-based community analysis is simply not practicable at any realistic scale (too time consuming, poor resolution, small samples, can only be done by high experienced experts, too expensive, wrong life-cycle phase mostly collected, etc.).  This phase of the project will provide a basis for meeting the EU 7th framework’s priority for showing “impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems” of climate change, pollution, etc., by making, for example, soil faunal/fungal population ecology widely accessible for the first time.