Background to the Call

The Horizon Europe Project Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovation (TETTRIs) is a joint effort of 17 partners tackling the shortage of taxonomic experts and resources in tools, training, and access to funding. As an EU funded project TETTRIs is co-led by RBINS and CETAF (acting as main contact point for 3PP Call). TETTRIs aims to enhance the understanding of the diversity of life on Earth through research, training, and innovation in taxonomy, particularly in European biodiversity hotspots and protected areas.

The TETTRIs Consortium is pleased to announce a call for proposals to fund initiatives under what we call Third-Party Projects (3PP). This call supports research and innovation projects for transforming European taxonomy, with a total budget of nearly 1.8 million euros funded by the European Union, under the Framework Programme Horizon Europe.

The call invites proposals that contribute to validating the nine TETTRIs outcomes and expanding mechanisms for engaging in taxonomy-related participation in specific areas of high diversity and subject to special protection. The call supports facilities and initiatives in local nodes to enable the transfer of knowledge from educators in taxonomy and researchers working on natural science collections to targeted individuals. These include those working in biodiversity conservation, decision-makers, science teachers, museum educators, university students, citizens, and other stakeholders.

TETTRIs is a starting point to launch the above components and provides a plan for their sustainability beyond the project duration. In addition to the multidimensional model, TETTRIs will include a process for testing, assessment and validation that will involve on-field actors close to hotspots and protected areas. To do that, TETTRIs will collaborate with third-party projects (3PP) and allocate 30% of the project funding for these activities. The community-based perspective is fundamental to the entire ethos of the project from the inception stage to the piloting, evaluation and through to the final endorsement.

The main objectives for the distribution of third-party funding reflects the scope of the call:

To pilot, support, guide and supervise the establishment of adequate facilities in several local nodes as well as build capacity near biodiversity hotspots as the key activity of the action, while ensuring the most efficient transfer of knowledge from scientific experts to societal actors.

Funding

The complete funding program to allocate €1.8 million of grant funding to the third-party projects (3PP) will be developed via co-creation with citizen scientists, represented in the Community Implementation Board (CIB).

The third-party funding will be used to implement and validate activities initiated in Work Packages (WP) 1, 4 and 6 and link back to the following project objectives:

• Objective 3: Formulate a roadmap for physical and digital reference collections and validate it by creating a pollinator reference collection.
• Objective 4: Develop a sector-specific training framework and demonstrate it by facilitating training programmes that increase professional and non-professional taxonomy expertise.
• Objective 5: Test and validate the innovations developed with new taxonomic tools.