The International Barcode of Life Consortium (iBOL) launched its new research program BIOSCAN in June 2019, to scale up its efforts to inventory life on Earth at a time when an ecological crisis is threatening the planet.

Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have highlighted the scale of the pressures that threaten the environment and that are triggering a massive extinction event. Public awareness of these issues is growing and there are increasing demands for policymakers to work to support the environment and to focus on sustainable solutions.

Large-scale datasets are key to empowering societies and politicians to make these changes. Such data are available for some global systems, such as climate and land cover, and national scale datasets are often available for agriculture, human population, and land use. However, at present, biodiversity is not represented at the level of detail or at the scale and frequency required to support decision-making.

The International Barcode of Life Consortium (iBOL) launched its new research program BIOSCAN in June 2019, to scale up its efforts to inventory life on Earth at a time when an ecological crisis is threatening the planet.

Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have highlighted the scale of the pressures that threaten the environment and that are triggering a massive extinction event. Public awareness of these issues is growing and there are increasing demands for policymakers to work to support the environment and to focus on sustainable solutions.

Large-scale datasets are key to empowering societies and politicians to make these changes. Such data are available for some global systems, such as climate and land cover, and national scale datasets are often available for agriculture, human population, and land use. However, at present, biodiversity is not represented at the level of detail or at the scale and frequency required to support decision-making.

As a result of delivering an efficient tool for identifying and classifying any organism, we gain the ability to explore and track the patterns of communities and ecosystems through time and space. This is especially important for understanding hyperdiverse groups and megadiverse regions. Detailed community analysis is unachievable, or at least unscalable when it depends on sorting and identifying thousands of cryptic organisms, which is the situation for most insects, fungi or marine organisms. As sequencing technologies and bioinformatics capabilities continue to advance, these same difficult groups can be routinely and regularly sampled and described. This offers whole new windows into the structure, ecology, and dynamics of each ecosystem, opening up unprecedented opportunities to understand and respond to biological systems. Perhaps most importantly of all, high-bandwidth DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity can support intelligent approaches to landscape-level conservation, agriculture and pest management, and response to climate change.

BIOSCAN will lay the foundation for an earth observation system. It will examine biological communities from at least half the world’s ecoregions to begin the task of compiling comprehensive biodiversity baselines.

BIOSCAN comes at a time when technological advances are combining with the rich data held in BOLD to increase the cost-effectiveness of barcoding and metabarcoding. The iBOL community internationally, and particularly the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG) at Guelph, are at the forefront in exploiting next-generation sequencing. iBOL’s approach is to use the power and scale of these platforms to focus on a narrow subset of each species’ genome as the tool that cheaply permits the broadest possible detection and identification of any species.

By deep sequencing tens of millions of DNA extracts from single specimens and metabarcoding more than 100 million specimens from 2,000 sites spanning half the world’s ecoregions, BIOSCAN will expose countless undescribed species and reveal their distributions, dynamics and hidden interactions. Although BIOSCAN will not register all species or fully reveal their dynamics and interactions, it will be the foundation for a 20-year mission that will achieve these goals. Along the way, the aim is to develop the network to include practitioners and projects in all regions.

Participation is sought from researchers in all countries to expand iBOL’s coalition and explore multi-cellular diversity throughout the world’s ecosystems. iBOL welcomes comments and online discussion on the draft Strategic Plan for BIOSCAN.

We share our planet with more diversity than we yet recognise. This diversity drives the systems that keep the planet habitable for our species and those on which we depend. Now is the time to understand and monitor biodiversity everywhere. BIOSCAN is a key opportunity to make this happen.