On Tuesday 11 September ESFRI officially introduced DiSSCo on the 2018 European roadmap as a priority Research Infrastructure during the Launch Ceremony at the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna. This is a huge milestone for European natural science Collections as the ESFRI Roadmap identifies new Research Infrastructures (RI) of pan-European interest corresponding to the long term needs of the European research communities.

The 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2), held from 24-27 July in Copenhagen, Denmark, assembled a broad group of stakeholders, several ICEDIG representatives among them, in a follow up conference to the first GBIC held in the same city five years ago.

Late on Friday (29/06) afternoon the ICEDIG consortium received the great news that ESFRI has formally accepted the DiSSCo initiative - for which ICEDIG is a design study - on its 2018 roadmap update, making European Natural Science Collection a recognised priority research infrastructure, supporting scientific excellence and innovation towards urgent societal challenges.

On July, 13th, three days of intense work meetings at the first ICEDIG All Hands meeting came to an end. It brought all project partners and participants together to meet, engage in discussions, promote the exchange of knowledge and experiences, and to coordinate current and future efforts on the ICEDIG work packages and tasks.

The first ICEDIG Roundtable took place on 11 June at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and focused on specifications of a Collection Digitisation Dashboard. Luc Willemse (Naturalis) had invited 20 participants representing CETAF, ICEDIG project partners and external experts.