The Catalogue of Life and its infrastructure are used in many ways to support biodiversity science, policy, and data management. The use cases and showcases highlighted here offer a glimpse of COL’s impact on taxonomic harmonisation, collection management, policy reporting, and data quality improvement, with even more examples found in scientific literature and community contributions.

Taxonomically Represent Data Holdings

The Catalogue of life is being used to taxonomically harmonise data and enable the discovery and use of biodiversity data of various data infrastructures.

Show cases

• Used to taxonomically represent more than 3.1 billion species occurrences mediated through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Since the onset, the Catalogue has served as the primary source for building GBIF’s taxonomy backbone. This collaboration has evolved over time, one of the latest joint projects started in 2020 to develop an enhanced process that improves both data coverage and quality of COL’s data. As a result, GBIF will adopt the Catalogue of Life eXtended Release as its main taxonomic classification from 2025.

• The Barcode of Life (BOL) is working towards adopting the Catalogue of Life as the foundation for its taxonomic view, which helps organize 16.5 million public DNA barcode records. Both organizations are collaborating to integrate taxonomic feedback from BOL’s users and taxonomy experts into the Catalogue of Life.

Validated Policy-Relevant Species Data

The Catalogue of Life is used to harmonise species data across policies, countries, and reporting frameworks, ensuring consistency and accuracy in decision-making.

Show cases

• The European Environment Agency uses the Catalogue as a taxonomic reference to harmonise species data reported by EU Member States under various directives on habitats, birds, invasive species, and more. Learn more.

• The Convention on Biological Diversity uses the Catalogue to track global progress on taxonomic knowledge transfer, as reflected in the Aichi Targets mid-term report (see page 119). Read the report.