eDNAqua-Plan Outcomes Fact Sheet

The building blocks for a FAIRer, machine-actionable (e)DNA digital ecosystem already exist, yet they remain scattered, unevenly adopted, and poorly integrated across biodiversity and genomics domains. The solution does not lie in creating new databases, repositories, or tools, but in enforcing open data publishing using existing infrastructure, embracing shared standards and persistent identifiers, and making metadata truly machine-readable and accessible. This transformation cannot be achieved in silos. Interoperability must be treated as critical infrastructure—demanding long-term investment in governance, community collaboration, and the upkeep of standards, mappings, vocabularies, and other essential practices outlined throughout eDNAqua-Plan’s outcomes. Without this commitment, the potential of (e)DNA for evidence-based policy and global biodiversity conservation could remain just out of reach.