iBOL Europe

Video: Introducing iBOL Europe

Kasia Fantoni — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:43:30 +0000

This video introduces our community of researchers and practitioners and tells about how DNA barcoding can be applied in different fields – from biodiversity monitoring to food authentication and more.

This video was produced thanks to funding from the Biodiversity Genomics Europe project.

Illustrations by Marta Marilungo, Script by Kasia Fantoni, Production by Alberto Abbate.
The video is licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 license, so anyone can play, use and remix it as needed.

CETAF, iBOL Europe & ERGA Sign Agreement for Biodiversity Genomics in Europe

Kasia Fantoni — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:23:39 +0000

The European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA), the International Barcode of Life Europe (iBOL Europe), and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have signed an agreement for biodiversity genomics in Europe. These three large scientific communities have committed to building a coordinated European infrastructure for biodiversity genomics, enabling experts to work within a connected system of shared resources, technologies, and data.

The vision has taken shape within the Biodiversity Genomics Europe plus (BGE+) project and aligns with the European Commission’s environmental goals.

The initiative addresses a significant challenge in contemporary biodiversity research: scale. Although over two million species have been formally described globally, scientists estimate that millions remain unidentified. This knowledge gap impedes effective conservation efforts. Meeting the demands of rapid environmental change requires innovative approaches that enhance scientific collaboration and interoperability. Initiatives such as BGE+ are significant steps in this direction.

By combining two distinct strands of genomics, DNA barcoding and genome sequencing, together with taxonomic expertise and advanced data systems, BGE+ creates new possibilities for understanding and protecting nature.

Advancing DNA BARcoding in Europe for Efficient, Sustainable and Inclusive BioDIVersity Monitoring

Kasia Fantoni — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:25:46 +0000

DNABARDIV is the new COST Action that will enable the European DNA Barcoding community to integrate existing national efforts, fill critical gaps in barcode reference libraries, and build standardised protocols aligned with FAIR/CARE principles.

The Action CA25120 – Advancing DNA BARcoding in Europe for Efficient, Sustainable and Inclusive BioDIVersity Monitoring (DNABARDIV) will deliver open-access resources, including curated data platforms, sampling and sequencing protocols, training materials, and policy guidance. Dedicated activities – training schools, short-term scientific missions, and regional coordination nodes – will empower early-career researchers and strengthen capacity, particularly in underrepresented regions.

The idea of a COST Action for the DNA barcoding community in Europe has been in iBOL Europe’s plans for a few years, and the process of submitting a proposal officially started in June 2025 at the Workshop we held at the University of Lodz and continued throughout the summer, with community members from all over the region meeting regularly, with Emre Keskin (Ankara University, TR) chairing the process. The resulting proposal is built along the iBOL Europe strategic priorities, which were also identified at the Workshop in Lodz, with one Action Working Group per strategic priority: Community Building, Sample Collection & Taxonomic Verification, Sequencing Infrastructure, Data Management and Applications.

For us, iBOL Europe, the COST Action is a natural continuation of the community’s work on building reference libraries and on advancing the network across Europe.
The Action will offer opportunities for training, knowledge sharing, and engaging working groups, including countries and groups that would otherwise have fewer opportunities to participate.

To the Action

Acting locally, impacting globally: New blueprints chart the course for DNA Barcoding in Europe and beyond

Kasia Fantoni — Fri, 22 May 2026 07:52:37 +0000

On this International Day for Biological Diversity, themed “Acting locally for global impact,” we are releasing two papers that aim to facilitate the development of a robust network of DNA barcoding practitioners, delineating regional/national approaches that are adaptable and replicable globally: “Empowering national capacity for a DNA-based approach to species identification and biodiversity monitoring,” by Kaitetzidou, E. et al., with Grabowski, M. as the senior and corresponding author, published in Metabarcoding & Metagenomics, providing advice on the set up and implementation of International Barcode of Life (iBOL) national nodes; and “Species identification, discovery and biomonitoring: strategic priorities for DNA barcoding in Europe, set in a global context,” by Hollingsworth, P. et al., published in BioScience, proposing a mission and related strategic priorities for the iBOL Europe community.

Focusing on the national level, Kaitetzidou et al. synthesise experiences from 20 countries, highlighting strategies for capacity building, methodological standardisation, stakeholder engagement, funding diversification and communication, ultimately providing 10 recommendations to guide the establishment and long-term success of national DNA barcoding nodes.

Complementing this from the trans-European perspective, Hollingsworth et al. propose a broad mission for iBOL Europe to produce, curate and provide access to a DNA barcode reference library of eukaryotic species, with the immediate goals of compiling reference libraries for priority taxa, democratising access to sequencing technologies, and strengthening a distributed community of practice.

The papers underscore that building a comprehensive reference library of European biota is a race against time, particularly in high-diversity regions like Southern and South-Eastern Europe, which are biodiversity endemism centres of global importance, threatened by urbanisation and climate change, yet still lacking deep DNA barcode coverage.

Taken together, these two articles represent a stepping stone not only for the DNA barcoding community in Europe but also for strengthening the local, regional and global infrastructures and the involvement of professional taxonomists and citizen scientists to deliver robust DNA-based biodiversity monitoring, underpin metabarcoding and metagenomic studies, and contribute to global efforts in species discovery, conservation, and environmental management.

While both papers are the result of community authorship and ongoing consultations over the years, their propositions are not intended to be fixed: they are open to our community for feedback and adjustments.

This is particularly true for iBOL Europe’s vision and mission proposal: the delineated objectives and priorities serve as a starting point; they can be amended and adapted to better meet needs that may arise at any time. The mission paper will be presented and discussed at the July community meeting on 27 July.

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Both papers were published with support from the Biodiversity Genomics Europe project, funded through Horizon Europe, the UK Research & Innovation Fund and the Swiss Confederation.

A press release is available here.

Graphic by Suzanne Bateson, CC BY-SA.

Community Meeting June 2026

Kasia Fantoni — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:34:51 +0000

The next Community Meeting took place on Monday, 01 June from 14:30 to 15:30 CEST, on Zoom.

At this slightly shorter edition of our meeting, we got an introduction to BGE+, the prosecution of the BGE project, which started in May, by Dimitris Koureas (Naturalis Biodiversity Centre), BGE + Project Director.
We were also joined by Magda Bou Dagher Kharrat (European Forest Institute), who presented MEDFORGEN – the Mediterranean Forest Genetic Resources Network.

Our Community Meetings are free for all iBOL Europe members to join. You can join our community here – that’s also free!

Photo by FantoKasia on Flickr. CC-BY 4.0.

BgBOL launches webinar series

Kasia Fantoni — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:13:07 +0000

The Bulgarian Barcode of Life (BgBOL) just announced a series of online seminars featuring international experts, focused on ot scientific topics of practical and academic importance.

The next session will focus on the Digital Catalogue of Biodiversity of Poland and the Polish Biodiversity Information Network.

When: Thursday 28 May 2026, 15:00 – 16:00 EEST (14:00 – 15:00 CEST).
Lecturer: Prof. Michal Grabowski (University of Lodz, Polish Barcode of Life)
Language: English
Access: on Zoom via this link.

The first session dived into GBIF, exploring why data publishing matters and how it benefits the global research community.

When: Thursday 23 April 2026, 15:00 – 16:00 EEST (14:00 – 15:00 CEST).
Lecturer: Dr Salza Palpurina (National Museum of Natural History of Sofia; GBIF Regional Support Team)
Language: English
Access: on Zoom via this link.

The webinar series will continue with sessions in May and September. More info is available on BgBOL’s website.

Community Meeting March 2026

Kasia Fantoni — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:16:58 +0000

The last edition of our community meeting took place on 30 March.

We started the meeting with Christian de Guttry, Robert Waterhouse (Swiss Bioinformatics Institute), and Nick Juty (University of Manchester), who walked us through BioDiv-FC, a project addressing the lack of biodiversity-specific requirements in many FAIR assessment tools. You can find their presentation here.

Then, Andriy Novikov (State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) and Oleksander Zinenko (Karazin Kharkiv National University) discussed the project “High-mountain grasslands transformation in the Ukrainian Carpathians” and its use of DNA barcoding. Andriy’s presentation is available here; Oleksander’s here.

The last presentation was by Kristy Deiner (SimplexDNA/SciArt), about SciArt. SciArt is an initiative exploring the interface between science and art, involving eDNA activities and citizen scientists, among many others.

Our Community Meetings are free for all iBOL Europe members to join. You can join our community here – that’s also free!

Photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash

Connections Booklet: Discovering Biodiversity Genomics

Kasia Fantoni — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:18:37 +0000

What is biodiversity? And genomics? And how are they related to each other in ways that help species monitoring and conservation?

Throughout 2025, the “ERGA – iBOL Europe Connections” blog post series addressed these and many other questions about biodiversity genomics, such as the role that citizens play in biodiversity conservation, the difference between DNA barcodes and reference genomes, and all the related disciplines.

This series of blog posts was produced by us, the Biodiversity Genomics Europe project’s Capacity Pillar team, composed of representatives from both the iBOL Europe and ERGA Secretariats.

Each Connection covers an aspect of biodiversity genomics and comes with a simplified-language version, the EasyConnection. The EasyConnections are intended for a lay audience and school pupils, and can be used by teachers at different levels of instruction.

Since the end of BGE is fast approaching, we decided to collect all of the EasyConnections in a single booklet, “Connections – Discovering Biodiversity Genomics.”

The booklet features eight chapters, links to extra material and media, and a “Games” section at the end to test your knowledge once you’ve read the booklet. To make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we have been translating it into different European languages, and for now, it is accessible in Italian and Portuguese.

We hope that “Connections” will help you get a better understanding of the fascinating world of biodiversity genomics, and that you will enjoy playing with it!

Workshop: Developing a European eDNA Society

Kasia Fantoni — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:43:38 +0000

On 5-6 February 2026, a workshop gathering representatives from iBOL Europe and the nascent European eDNA Society – eDNA^Europe – took place at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (NL).

eDNA^Europe is a nascent initiative exploring the feasibility of establishing a European society focused on environmental DNA (eDNA) and four Missions:

Build a European community of eDNA researchers and stakeholders
Connect the European eDNA community with wider national, regional and global initiatives
Promote technological advancement and share research findings and best practices
Facilitate mainstreaming of eDNA methods into policy and practice

By bringing together the core group of the European eDNA Society and representatives of iBOL Europe, the Workshop allowed for discussions about developing the respective communities by aligning intents and objectives and giving time and space to the European eDNA Society core group to discuss governance and strategy of the Society.

The Workshop was made possible by funds provided by the Biodiversity Genomics Europe project, funded by the European Commission, the UK Research and Innovation Agency and the Swiss Confederation.

Community Meeting January 2026

Kasia Fantoni — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 11:07:42 +0000

The first community meeting of the year happened on 26 January.

For a start, we received some updates from the Working Group leads.

Then, Pablo Orozco (Leibniz-Institut DSMZ) walked us through the newly entered-into-force Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ). While the BBNJ Treaty covers a wide range of issues, Pablo focused his presentation on Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs).

Then, Samuel Vanden Abele (Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) presented Bop.Co, a species identification unit jointly run by the Institute of Natural Sciences and the Africa Museum. Bop.Co specialises in the identification of policy-relevant organisms and their derived products, using DNA analysis tools and expert taxonomic knowledge – a great example of DNA barcoding applications.

The last presentation was about the BGE paper “Empowering national capacity for DNA-based approach to species identification and biodiversity monitoring” by authors Elizavet Kaitetzidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Michał Grabowski (University of Łódź). The paper is available here.

The Community Meetings are free to join for all iBOL Europe members. You can join our community here – that’s also free!

Photo by Jörg Braukmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.