The first milestone of the eDNAqua-Plan project (M2), achieved in November 2023, had the aim to set out the research criteria destined to find and analyse the online DNA barcoding and eDNA projects/initiatives in Europe while providing the taxonomic, geographical, ecological and (meta)data overlap/gap analysis for the DNA barcode reference libraries and eDNA repositories.

The search criteria were set by defining specific keywords or terms that can be found in different sources, such as online databases, scientific literature, etc., and identifying types of projects that could be in scope of eDNAqua-Plan, for example, research studies, databases, initiatives, etc. This milestone sets out a crucial step for the implementation of Work Package 2 “Audit & Gap analysis” of the project.

Once the search criteria have been defined; considered as the milestone, the next step is to proceed with identification of the projects and their analysis to understand what taxa they cover (taxonomic analysis), where they are located (geographical analysis), what type of environments they take into account (ecological analysis), and what other information they associate with the genetic data (metadata analysis). As final step of Work Package 2, there will be a comparison of the diverse information of each of the identified projects while paying attention to identify their overlaps and gaps.