“…Over the past several years, the community around NSCs recognized the gaps in our understanding of bioand geo-diversity due to loosely coordinated data infrastructures (Hardisty and Roberts 2013). This has led to increased efforts towards creating shared global roadmaps for biodiversity informatics (Hobern et al 2019), developing standards for improved data quality (Chapman et al 2020), adopting FAIR principles (Agosti et al 2019;Grobe et al 2019) and creating building blocks for a data landscape in which component systems can exchange and understand the information in a standard form using open protocols, and metadata (Lannom et al 2020). The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), along with several global partners, is working towards such a data landscape by building a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) that aims to mobilize and unify bio-and geo-diversity information connected to the specimens held in natural science collections.…”