Building the Molecular Biodiversity Greece Community

In the face of the biodiversity crisis, concerted efforts towards understanding the effects of climate change and habitat loss and fragmentation, both locally and globally, are urgently needed. These are often attempted by leveraging the advances of modern genomics and bioinformatics methodologies. Especially in biodiversity hotspots, the need to understand, monitor and mitigate the loss of biodiversity is pivotal. Greece is a country with especially high endemism. A large percentage of its endemic species is threatened by climate change and human activities. To this end, the national academic community in biodiversity genomics has established a corresponding network of scientists from various Greek research institutes and universities covering different disciplines of biodiversity research. The network aims to support and combine individual actions to establish a Task Force that will channel the flow of information amongst researchers, policy makers, stakeholders and the local society. Our overarching goal is to build a sustainable community and infrastructure for the efficient management of the entire molecular biodiversity data cycle (i.e., from production and storage to the analysis and modelling of data, development of computational tools, and knowledge extraction). Using national and European infrastructures, such as ELIXIR and LifeWatch, we envision to set the ground for studying biodiversity through the lens of biodiversity genomics and offer evidence-based knowledge to guide management of the habitats and the biodiversity they host, as well as the implementation of appropriate policies.