Scientists at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) have joined European colleagues today to recognise the third Taxonomy Recognition Day.
The EU-funded TETTRIs project is a call to action for scientists, institutions, and everyone to join the #NameItToSaveIt campaign.
The TETTRIs project (Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovation) brings together 17 partner institutions from across Europe, including leading natural history museums, botanical gardens, and research organisations, under a shared mandate to strengthen taxonomic knowledge and infrastructure in support of the EU’s biodiversity governance commitments.
The project is funded under the HORIZON programme and runs from December 2022 to May 2026, with a total budget of approximately €6m.
The programme has established 23 May as Taxonomy Recognition Day, an annual occasion dedicated to raising public awareness of taxonomy, the scientific discipline responsible for naming, classifying, and describing life on Earth.
The accompanying campaign, #NameItToSaveIt, invites researchers, institutions, students, and members of the public to take part through events, educational activities, and social media engagement.
The second Taxonomy Recognition Day, held on 23 May 2025, saw more than 30 institutions across Europe participate, from the Canary Islands to Norway.
Events included expert lectures, public debates, behind-the-scenes museum tours, hands-on identification workshops, and networking sessions for both specialists and general audiences.
On social media, the #NameItToSaveIt campaign was shared by individuals and organisations across the globe, reaching a combined audience of over 700,000 people.
The launch of Taxonomy Recognition Day comes at a point when the importance of taxonomic knowledge has never been greater, and the gap between need and capacity has never been more apparent.
The 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits signatory countries, including EU Member States, to implementing comprehensive biodiversity monitoring programmes by 2030.
The European Green Deal, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, and the Nature Restoration Law all set binding or indicative targets for halting and reversing biodiversity loss, targets that depend on the ability to identify, track, and document species across ecosystems.
Yet the scientific infrastructure required to meet these commitments is under strain. It is estimated that only around 15% of global biodiversity is currently described and documented.
More than one million species are threatened with extinction worldwide, many of them still unknown to science.
At the same time, the pool of trained taxonomists — the specialists who carry out the work of documenting, naming, and classifying organisms — is itself declining, with expertise concentrated in a small number of institutions and unevenly distributed across Europe.
As Ana Casino, Technical Coordinator for the TETTRIs project, has noted: “Taxonomy is more than just naming species — it’s about understanding the ties that bind every living thing on Earth.
“With species vanishing at an unprecedented rate, the work of taxonomists has never been more urgent. How can you protect something if you don’t know its name?”
Professor Olwen Grace, Deputy Director of Science (Collections) at RBGE, explained: “Every species has a story. But without a name, that story may never be told.
“On May 23, a coalition of Europe’s leading natural history museums, botanic gardens, universities, and research institutions will be the leads on the third annual Taxonomy Recognition Day, a continent-wide call to celebrate taxonomy: the foundational science that names, classifies, and describes the diversity of life on Earth.”
