The paper proposes a mission and related strategic priorities for the iBOL Europe community from a trans-European perspective 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.
While the paper is the result of community authorship and ongoing consultations over the years, its propositions are not intended to be fixed: they are open to our community for feedback and adjustments.
“Species identification, discovery and biomonitoring: strategic priorities for DNA barcoding in Europe, set in a global context,” by Hollingsworth, P. et al., was published in BioScience on 22 May 2026.
The work was supported by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme through the Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) project.
Graphic by Suzanne Bateson, CC BY-SA.