The BGE+ Abridged Grant Proposal has been published in Pensoft’s Research Ideas and Outcomes Journal.
Abstract
The Biodiversity Genomics Europe plus (BGE+) Project builds on a pan-European collaboration to scale up the production and uptake of genomic evidence for taxonomy, monitoring, and policy. It widens participation, standardises methods, and prepares a distributed European system for biodiversity genomics that links molecules to ecosystems. The BGE+ consortium unites the International Barcode of Life in Europe (iBOL Europe, barcoding), the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA, reference genomes) and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF, taxonomic research and natural history collections) to align end-to-end workflows from field sampling to application. This publication is an abridged version of the successful grant proposal developed jointly by iBOL Europe, ERGA, and CETAF in response to the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-BIODIV-03. BGE+ has four overarching objectives: (1) broaden participation and capacity; (2) make distributed genomic data production interoperable and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) by design; (3) translate evidence into practice through co-designed use-case roadmaps; and (4) define the service portfolio and assess the financial and technical feasibility of a future European research infrastructure in biodiversity genomics. Through targeted cascade grants (Financial Support to Third Parties) and hands-on training, BGE+ enlarges community capacity while converging on shared protocols and standard practices, improving data interoperability and consolidating community efforts. Building on previous work, BGE+ carries forward the communities’ long-term vision: turning fragmented efforts into a coherent, scalable system that delivers reliable genomic evidence for taxonomy and policy.