WP1 Coordination and Management

WP leader: Yde de Jong, WP managers: Eric Breuker, Juliana Kouwenberg

WP1 is charged with the management of the project as a whole. This work package consists of the project coordinator and two part-time project managers at the University of Amsterdam, and the Steering Committee. The leaders of the six work packages and representatives of four taxonomic research communities populate the Steering Committee (SC). The SC has the authority to take major decisions on the project.
WP1 represents PESI in contacts with major external stakeholders such as other infrastructure initiatives and policy making bodies, and plans for maintenance and development of the taxonomic infrastructure after the current funding has ended in May 2011.

The WP1 managers are in charge of the day-to-day management of the project on behalf of the Steering Committee. Their tasks include the coordination of the project, adaptive planning of activities and the timely submission of project Deliverables to the European Commission, in close collaboration with the WP Leaders. WP1 oversees the progress in the other work packages, and provides support where necessary.
WP1 is further responsible for a range of administrative and organisational tasks concerning the project as a whole, such as preparation of the Consortium Agreement, financial administration and reporting, preparation of meetings of the SC and general Meetings.

WP2 Coordination and integration of European expert networks

WP leader: Henrik Ærenlund Pedersen,  WP manager: Phillip Bøgh

The strengthening and integration of European taxonomic communities has been progressing since the start of the taxonomic indexing EU framework programmes Fauna Europaea, European Register of Marine Species (ERMS), and Euro+Med PlantBase. These initiatives built up expert networks to fulfill the project objectives and played an important role in helping to identify and consolidate the European taxonomic expertise. In addition Fauna Europaea and ERMS organised their expert resources in the Society for the Management of European Biodiversity Data (SMEBD), which was established to ensure the long-term ownership and management of the intellectual property rights (IPR) of the contributors of these databases. PESI will review and develop long-term strategies and plans for the sustainability of the involved systems in terms of ownership, IPR, and support of individual experts and institutions. A significant addition to the species registers from PESI will be the expansion of the network of expertise in Eastern Europe. This is overdue considering the expansion of the EU. In addition to providing more comprehensive data for the pan-European species registers, this expansion will reverse the separation of knowledge and practice in taxonomy for many decades. Another addition will be the closer involvement of taxonomic societies, especially on adopting relevant taxonomic sectors for long-term maintenance and upgrading.

WP3 Coordination and integration of European Focal Point networks

WP leader: Nihat Aktac, WP manager: Juliana Kouwenberg

In addition to creating a network of taxonomic experts, PESI will also develop a network of regional (often national) focal points. These focal points (either individuals or organisations) will complement the taxonomic network through: (1) liaison with national governmental bodies on the implementation of European standards relevant to, for instance, national and European regulations and environmental monitoring, (2) collection and transfer of local expertise and applied tools, (3) lobbying and public policy input at the national and European level, and (4) support for closer collaboration of scientific contributor and user communities across Europe. Focal points contribute country-specific information about species, relevant databases, local literature, experts, professional societies and major users such as government organisations.

Building on existing focal point networks, PESI investigates models to establish a more formal, integrated structure of pan-European Regional Focal Points to enable joint activities. One of these activities will be the enrichment of the European taxonomic information systems with vernacular (common) names. The absence of vernacular names indices of all European languages is currently hindering the general application of biodiversity information by non-expert users.

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WP4 Coordination of taxonomic metadata standard assessment

WP leader: Charles Hussey, WP manager: Roger Hyam

Application of approved standards is necessary to ensure that the datasets contributing to PESI can be incorporated effectively and also so that PESI can share data with external resources. Work Package 4 will identify and implement appropriate standards within PESI. In particular, WP4 will support the work of WP5 and WP6.

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WP5 Coordination and integration of information e-infrastructures

WP leader: Walter Berendsohn, WP manager: Anton Guentsch

PESI technically integrates the pan-European species registers into an interoperable e-infrastructure by harmonising the respective information infrastructures and by creating a joint access (middle) layer. PESI will establish mirror sites for ERMS, Fauna Europaea, and Euro+Med Plant Base, and thus elevate their services and content to a new level. PESI will link the planned joint European taxonomic e-infrastructures middle-layer to the global e-gateway.

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WP6 Integrated e-Services for users and dissemination

WP leader: Ward Appeltans

PESI will build an interactive, multilingual web portal to carry out the dissemination of the developed species names service and to support the use of the pan-European species data in the e-science domain. This will include relevant supplementary data, like occurrence details by applying dynamic links to pertinent e-data services.

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