BIOSCAN
illuminate biodiversity to save our living planet
2019 – 2028
Our Mission
To illuminate biodiversity by developing globally accessible DNA-based systems to speed species discovery, probe species interactions, and establish biodiversity baselines
- malber02@uoguelph.ca
- +1 519 824-4120 x58259
BIOSCAN is laying the foundation for a global biodiversity monitoring system and to explore its socio-economic implications. It will achieve its scientific goals by coupling a massive, strategic sampling campaign with technologies that have never been integrated and implemented at the scale required for planetary biosurveillance.
Its work is made possible by recent advances in DNA sequencers and by the fact that species can be discerned with a tiny fraction of their genome. Until now, our capacity to leverage this approach into advanced understanding of ecosystem properties and societal implementation has been constrained by lack of cross-disciplinarity and limited data.
BIOSCAN will break these barriers by developing cost-effective protocols that deliver biodiversity data at unprecedented speed and volume, and by applying this knowledge in diverse economic, policy, and regulatory contexts.
This project is led by the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) Consortium.
BIOSCAN: a global scientific mission
Environmental change is driving species extinctions at an accelerating pace. If we are to curb these trajectories, we must be able to rapidly track changes in biodiversity on a planetary scale. Motivated by this urgent need, the International Barcode of Life Consortium activated BIOSCAN in June 2019. Coordinated from the CBG, BIOSCAN involves researchers and organizations from over 30 nations which share the goal of establishing an Earth observation system for biodiversity.
BIOSCAN Projects: around the world
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BIOALFA
Costa Rica’s stated goal to become the first tropical country in the world to fully know its biodiversity through the use of DNA barcoding, and to share that bioliteracy freely with their entire society
Arctic
BIOSCAN
This multi-year program is developing a platform for community- and DNA-based biomonitoring in the Canadian Arctic while engaging local Nunavummiut youth as field technicians
BIOSCAN
EUROPE
An initiative that brings together existing European national networks, scientists, and projects that work on biomonitoring using DNA with the goal of building an interconnected system
BIOSCAN
Canada
This interdisciplinary team works from coast to coast, overseeing a wide variety of smaller projects that make up Canada’s contribution to the global BIOSCAN program
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LIFEPLAN
This program has the ambitious aim to establish the current state of biodiversity across the globe, and to use those insights to generate accurate predictions of its future state under future scenarios
