Secretariat and infrastructure

The operational costs of the Catalogue of Life Secretariat and infrastructure are at present carried by an international consortium consisting of the Catalogue of Life Foundation, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS), and the Smithsonian Institution.

Project funding

Catalogue of Life is involved in several projects:

• Biodiversity Meets Data: A European Commission funded project focused on: ‘A Single Access Point (SAP) to high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools, biodiversity data, and biodiversity analyses for better conservation across Europe’. Catalogue of Life’s contribution is focused on mobilising policy relevant and national species lists, and intgrating these into the COL data product.
• TETTRIs: A European Commission funded project Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations delivering a contribution of the taxonomic community gathered around CETAF, the Consortium of European taxonomic facilities, to provide knowledge, systems and services to tackle biodiversity loss. Catalogue of Life, through its infrastructure ChecklistBank, provides specific taxonomic name matching services.

Past investments

• Mobilisation and use of species lists relevant for the Netherlands via the new Catalogue of Life infrastructure: A project funded through the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, with a focus on training work shops on using the COL infrastructure, ChecklistBank. In addition, the focus was to mobilise several species lists with relevance for the Netherlands. Project has been completed in 2024.

For years, the University of Reading as well as Naturalis Biodiversity Center financed a part of the operational costs for building the Catalogue of Life. Through these and other legal entities, such as Species 2000, involvement in several projects financed by the European Commission were secured. It is estimated that in its 29 years of existence, 20 million euro investment originating from the following projects (including from the EU):

• BiCIKL: A European Commission funded project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library aimed at connecting infrastructures to enable researchers to access services across the biodiversity data lifecycle. Catalogue of Life and ChecklistBank form the main taxonomic service and framework to connect participating infrastructures.
• DiSSCo Prepare: A European Commission funded project for the preparatory phase of the ESFRI initiative Distributed System for Scientific Collections. Species 2000 / Catalogue of Life was mostly involved in a technical work package to explore the required taxonomic services for the DiSSCo infrastructure.
• Synthesys+: A European Commission funded project creating an integrated European infrastructure for natural history collections. Through Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Catalogue of Life is mostly involved in supplying services to a specimen data refinery.
• Catalogue of Life Plus: A project funded by Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, Species 2000 / Catalogue of Life, Illinois Natural History Survey, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, and the Smithsonian Institute to complement the global work programme of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility on building a joined infrastructure for names and taxonomy.
• Open-Up! 2014-2015 - Opening up the Natural History Heritage for Europeana [Reference Number: 270890]
• EUBrazilOpenBio 2011-2013 - EU-Brazil Open Data and Cloud Computing e-Infrastructure for Biodiversity [Reference Number: 288754]
• i4Life 2010-2013 - Indexing for Life [Reference Number: 261555]
• BHL-Europe 2009-2012 - Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe [Reference Number: ECP-2008-DILI-518001]
• 4D4Life - Distributed Dynamic Diversity Databases for Life [Reference Number: 238988]
• EDIT 2006-2011 - Toward the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy [Reference Number: 018340]
• ENBI 2003-2005 - European Network for Biodiversity Information [Reference Number: EVK2-CT-2002-20020]
• EuroCat 2003-2006 - The Catalogue of Life: Biodiversity Resource and e-Science Gateway [Reference Number: EVR1-CT-2002-20011]