DiSSCo Italy | DiSSCo-IT

Proceedings of the final conference on the results achieved in ITINERIS for DiSSCo-RI

December 3, 2025News

This volume collects the results achieved by the CNR-ISMAR, CNR-IBBR, CNR-IRSA, and UniFi-SMA Operating Units within the ITINERIS project for the DiSSCo (The Distributed System of Scientific Collections) Research Infrastructure. The infrastructure aims to virtually bring together natural science collections and related information held in natural history museums, botanical gardens, research centers, and universities through a Europe-wide portal, making this heritage accessible for understanding environmental diversity and dynamics (recent and past) and for mapping future ecological sustainability actions. The results, presented at the conference "The Research Infrastructure DiSSCo-Italy and the PNRR ITINERIS project: advancements, results, and prospects" by the DiSSCo-ITINERIS Operating Units, highlight the activities of the Italian scientific community in preserving, digitizing, and developing new protocols to make natural science collections accessible, using modern information technologies.

The Andrea Cesalpino's herbarium (XVI century) is now available online

September 30, 2025Collections

Andrea Cesalpino’s Herbarium is a collection of essiccata gathered between 1555 and 1563. It is the oldest Herbarium in the world, where plants are arranged according to systematic criteria. Cesalpino is, in fact, considered the scientist who laid the foundations of modern systematic botany. The collection includes 768 vascular plant samples mounted on 266 sheets of paper, arranged in three boxes, with names in Italian, Latin, and Greek.

DiSSCo Digital Specimen Enrollment

September 4, 2025News

By enrolling your specimen datasets with DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections), your institution becomes part of an international movement transforming the way science, policy, and society access and use natural history data. Digital Specimen DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) will be provided by DiSSCo as a free service to specimen-hosting institutions worldwide, ensuring that all digital representations of specimens are findable, accessible, citable, and interoperable. PRE-REGISTER NOW!

'Life evolution': fossils selection of the Domenico Dal Lago's geo-paleontological collection

August 23, 2025Collections

Life evolution is a selection of fossils arranged to tell the evolution of life and landscape in the Agno valley (north-eastern Italy) along almost 3,000,000 years. They are part of the historical collection “Domenico Dal Lago”, consisting of more than 12,000 (mainly) fossil specimens, donated in 1929 by Domenico Dal Lago himself to the Municipality of Valdagno (VI, Northern Italy). Unfortunately, the original Dal Lago's catalog was lost, but some specimens have data regarding collection locality.

Five million digital specimens and images in DiSSCo: millions more to come

August 20, 2025News

DiSSCo-RI is proud to announce a major milestone: over five million digital specimens and digital media objects are now available in DiSSCo. You can see them right now on our DiSSCover platform! These resources are now live and can be referenced through their DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).

The Research Infrastructure DiSSCo-Italy and the PNRR ITINERIS project: advancements, results and prospects

June 17, 2025News

The meeting “The Research Infrastructure DiSSCo-Italy and the PNRR ITINERIS project: advancements, results and prospects” has been held at CNR-ISMAR headquarters in Venice on June 17 and 18, 2025. The meeting has provided a significant opportunity to showcase the main results achieved by the Operational Units of the DiSSCo Research Infrastructure within the PNRR ITINERIS Project (Italian Integrated Environmental Research Infrastructures System). During the meeting, a discussion forum was organized to explore the potential impacts of DiSSCo-RI activities on scientific innovation, data integration, biodiversity knowledge and protection, and technological development. This forum aimed to promote synergies among research institutions, infrastructures, museums, and stakeholders, focusing on the prospects of the DiSSCo-Italy node at both national and European levels. Through the digitization of natural scientific collections (NSC), i.e. the creation of the "digital twins" of physical specimens, the harmonization and publication of the data associated with them following the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), the research infrastructure DiSSCo (The Distributed System of Scientific Collections) aims to virtually integrate naturalistic collections preserved in museums, botanical gardens, research institutes and universities into a single European portal.

Carlo Siemoni's (XIX century) oak herbarium from worldwide

May 23, 2025Collections

The herbarium compiled by Carlo Siemoni (1805-1878) has been fully digitized and is currently available on the GBIF repository. Pictures come from a bound volume containing Quercus specimens from around the world, which is conserved at the UNIFI-SMA (University of Florence, Italy).

ITINERIS News & Events

February 18, 2025News

The ITINERIS project is coordinated by the CNR (National Research Council). It started in November 2022, and during 30 (+6) months will carry out an ensemble of cross-disciplinary actions across the different environmental sub-domains, with the main aim to build the network of the Italian environmental Research Infrastructures, connect it to the user community and establish access, trough the ITINERIS HUB, to the vast array of knowledge, data, analytical tools, and service produced by the participating RIs.

S.O.S. Tarout - For the protection of the last thousand-year-old Cypresses of the Sahara [in Italian]

January 30, 2025News

by Della Rocca G, Abdoun F, Emiliani G, Danti R, Arcidiaco L, Chiapparini M, Garcia Palacios Z, Pandin M, Gardin L, Gardumi G, Prada O, Moya Sanchez B, Moya Sanchez J, Cherubini P. Until the early 1800s in Europe, there was skepticism about the existence of a mythical, elusive forest believed to grow in the heart of the Sahara Desert. Those who inspired the idea faced significant criticism. In Western countries, it was often dismissed as imaginary, fanciful, or impossible. However, for the inhabitants of the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau in southern Algeria and their ancestors, this forest was an ancient and tangible reality. Even today, some remnants of their homes, doors, and everyday objects used by the Tuareg people are made from the wood of a tree they refer to as "Tarout", known scientifically as Cupressus dupreziana A. Camus. [in Italian]

DiSSCo workshop: DMP and Standards for Taxon Hypotheses

January 27, 2025Training

Hosted by our colleagues from the University of Tartu from 21-22 January 2025, DiSSCo’s latest technical workshop is titled "DiSSCo Data Management Plan for Machine Actionability and Standards for Taxon Hypotheses". Day 1 focused on DiSSCo’s Data Management Plan for machine actionability. The talk provided an overview and discussion of DiSSCo Transition deliverable D3.3, followed by a demonstration of DMP implementation on the PlutoF platform. Day 2 of the DiSSCo Transition workshop on DiSSCo’s DMP and Standards for Taxon Hypotheses focused on the standards aimed to provide a better understanding of the Taxon Concept Schema - or TCS - and the significant modifications introduced by the TCS 2 Task Group (Klazenga and Liljeblad, 2024). The workshop explored how taxonomic circumscriptions can be expressed in TCS 2, focusing on how it supports the characterisation and practical application of DNA-based THs.

Winter School “Interdisciplinary Biodiversity 2025” in Venice

January 27, 2025News

The inaugural ceremony of the Winter School Interdisciplinary Biodiversity 2025 took place today at the Sala Marino Berengo of Ca’ Foscari University. This interdisciplinary training program involves 30 young researchers, graduate and postgraduate students, from all over the world, selected by a scientific committee composed of scientists and humanists from the CNR and Ca’ Foscari University. The Winter School is organized by the School for International Education of Ca’ Foscari University in collaboration with the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-ISMAR) and sponsored by the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC).

The Aquatic Natural Collections of the CNR-ISMAR. Guidelines for biological metadata management v.1

December 12, 2024Training

The CNR-ISMAR DiSSCo WG developed this manual as part of Activity 6.6 National network of the aquatic science collection in the Italian Integrated Environmental Research Infrastructures System -ITINERIS Project. This guideline suggests a procedure for managing and harmonising the metadata associated with the physical specimens of the aquatic natural collections preserved at the Institute of Marine Sciences (CNR-ISMAR). Natural collections are archives containing a large amount of data from various research fields, such as zoology, botany, ecology, biogeography, physiology, geology, paleontology, etc. The metadata harmonisation of physical samples, following international reference standards, and creating a digital sample will make them usable for national and international initiatives, also contributing to the increase of the DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections, www.dissco.eu) Italian community in the natural science collections management

DiSSCo-ITINERIS: Florence Wrap-Up

November 14, 2024News

On November 14, 2024, a meeting of the UOs DiSSCo ITINERIS at Botanical Garden of the University of Florence, organized by the OU UNIFI-SMA. Eighteen people of the DiSSCo-ITINERIS staff (from CNR-ISMAR-VE, CNR-IRSA-BO, CNR-IBBR-BA, CNR-IBBR-FI, CNR-IRSA-VB, CNR-IRSA-TA, UNIFI-SMA) were present either in-person or online, and took part to the discussions. The following topics have been discussed: (i) procedure and status of digitalization of collections on GBIF; (ii) creation of the DiSSCo-ITINERIS Portal on GBIF; (iii) drafting of shared standard data policy for DiSSCo-IT. Moreover, Dr. Eleonora Fornaro (CNR-IBBR-BA) has illustrated the content of the ITINERIS course: "Access to Research Infrastructures: process and Modalities", which she participated in on Oct 24-25, 2024, in Rome, Italy.

DiSSCo Transition workshop on DiSSCo core technical infrastructure

October 30, 2024Youtube

This workshop, co-organised within the DiSSCo Transition project, aimed to discuss and prioritise next steps in developing the core infrastructure after completion of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the DiSSCo core infrastructure. The workshop included a demo of the current state of the MVP and an outline of options for further development with backlog and use cases, after which an open discussion took place. The MVP is intended for early adopters and will include around two million digital specimens but this may be extended shortly after the launch of the MVP to cater to the needs of identified early adopters or to test the infrastructure with a larger variety of specimen data, towards full operation in 2026.

DiSSCo FAIR Playbook

October 14, 2024Training

DiSSCo has just made public its FAIR Research Data Management Playbook, designed as a template to help organizations implement best practices in managing research data following the FAIR principles. The playbook is a practical guide to make research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) across various stages of the data lifecycle. The playbook provides a flexible structure that you can adapt to your organization’s specific data management needs. It’s not a strict policy document but a living resource that can evolve with your projects, data types, and technologies.

ClimateDT: A Global Scale-Free Dynamic Downscaling Portal for Historic and Future Climate Data

April 17, 2024Service

The Climate Downscaling Tool (ClimateDT) is a geo-web service designed to downscale various climatic variables and indices from multiple climate scenarios. The system operates on a 1 km grid. It utilizes a combination of the Climatic Research Unit Time-Series (CRU-TS) for historical climate data (from 1901 to the present) and the UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) dataset for future projections (from the present to 2098). It employs spatial interpolation methods, such as bilinear interpolation and inverse distance weighting, along with a dynamic lapse rate adjustment, to facilitate scale-free queries across Europe. The service is freely available to everyone at the URL reported below.

DiSSCo - A New Frontier for Biodiversity Research

October 9, 2023Youtube

As DiSSCo moves forward to its construction phase, the impact of the future Research Infrastructure is starting to be noticeable. The first solid steps of DiSSCo's business model for a future single European network of natural sciences collections is visible in services such as ELViS, DiSSCovery and other innovations based on the concept of Digital Extended Specimen. The DiSSCo's new corporate video helps understand how DiSSCo RI will open a new frontier for biodiversity research, tackling the following topics: (i) Global threats to biodiversity demand a new approach to biodiversity research. (ii) DiSSCo, a new model for Natural Sciences Collections. (iii) The Digital Extended Specimen, technical cornerstone of DiSSCo. (iv) Bringing Artificial Intelligence into the equation. (v) A fundamental shift in biodiversity research in Europe. Find out more about ELViS, DiSSCovery and other DiSSCo services: https://www.dissco.eu/services/ Get the latest technical posts about the design of DiSSCos Infrastructure: https://dissco.tech/ Preview of experimental services /demonstrators by the DiSSCo community: https://dissco.tech/labs/ Code hosting for DiSSCo software, version control and collaboration: https://github.com/DiSSCo

Securing the foundation of our food supply at -18° Celsius

June 7, 2023News

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, 6-7 June 2023 - The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has welcomed 40,507 new seed samples from nine genebank depositors, including collections from Latvia, Morocco, Taiwan, the USA, the Netherlands, Israel, Poland, Zambia, and Italy. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Vault, and with these new deposits from nine institutions—comprising international, regional, and national genebanks, as well as smaller collection holders—the total collection has surpassed 1.25 million seed samples. The Institute of Biosciences and BioResources from Bari, Italy (CNR-IBBR) has deposited seeds for the first time, becoming the 99th genebank to utilize the Seed Vault as a secure storage option for their seed samples. “We are pleased to back up our oldest collection, which dates back to our first collecting missions in the 1970s, when many of these accessions have since become extinct. Safeguarding agro-biodiversity is fundamentally important for the future of humanity, which depends on agriculture and food. Preserving and providing seeds to scientists and breeders is an increasingly vital and urgent need,” says Gaetano Laghetti of the CNR-IBBR in Italy.

DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections)

December 12, 2022Video

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for Natural Science Collections. The DiSSCo RI aims to create a new business model for one European collection that digitally unifies all European natural science assets, sharing common access, curation, policies, and practices across countries while ensuring that all the data complies with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data).

The Italian Central Herbarium in Florence

November 26, 2015Youtube

The cataloging and research activities of the Florence Herbarium are showcased in the Florintesa video. Herbaria serve as places of exploration and discovery, observation and conservation. They are networks of knowledge and exchange, vital repositories of biodiversity and beauty. Herbaria collect stories about people, plants, and places, as well as journeys and passions - what can be described as "Botanical Loves".

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