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 second of seven Roundtable meetings hosted within the ICEDIG project was held on Saturday, 22 September 2018 and was part of the Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for Preservation of Natural History Collections and the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization. This Round Table meeting entitled “Analogue 2 digital: faster better cheaper” gathered attendees from museums, herbaria, universities and other organizations concerned with biodiversity research, data management and monitoring.

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.