-

Extensive beach nourishments in the past decades delivered a vast treasure trove of Late Quaternary fossils and artefacts from the offshore Netherlands that illustrate tight interlinks between climate and sea level change, landscape evolution, biotic successions and hominin occupation history. However, the finds are out of context, and age data are scarce and partially compromised by diagenesis. This precludes a precise understanding of the evolution of Late Quaternary landscapes and biota, including hominin occupation history, in the southern North Sea Basin. The ongoing destruction of geological context of fossils by sand extraction and infrastructural projects makes safeguarding findings and insights important and urgent, to prevent further loss of a valuable geological archive. A combination of systematic, data-driven and citizen science approaches will help contextualize and safeguard scientific information. LegaSea aims to identify and characterize Late Quaternary vertebrate communities from the rich beach finds through a novel AI-assisted citizen-science approach. Together with a group of citizen scientists, we will develop and implement an AI-based approach to (1) standardize data collection, (2) create, train and validate species identification algorithms and (3) develop a semiautomated classification of fossilization modes in order to define consistent fossil assemblages. Combining a new age-dating programme that resolves existing inconsistencies and linking the communities to the stratigraphic succession from the extraction area will enable detailed reconstructions of successive landscapes and biotic communities in the North Sea Basin. The resulting environment-biotic data enables investigation of subjects such as the timing of vertebrate last occurrence dates and the ice age megafaunal extinction, the documentation of landscape phases, the stratigraphic origin of fossil marine faunas and Late Quaternary hominid occupation potential. The strategic approach of LegaSea will maximize scientific information harvesting from large scale destructive sand extraction projects thereby safeguarding our natural heritage. Our citizen-science network and approach will ensure the assembly of data and insights beyond the project duration. It has the ability to predict palaeontological (and archaeological) potential and to assist actors involved in coastal modifications and infrastructure to operate in an optimal, least destructive way.

Plant metabarcoding, including analyzing environmental DNA, is currently not standardized, preventing high-throughput large-scale analyses. METAPLANTCODE harmonizes best practices for metabarcoding of plants collected across Europe to accelerate species monitoring and integrate biodiversity data. Existing pipelines for species identification are standardized and linked to reference databases. Best practices on FAIR data publishing will be incorporated in the GBIF and INSDC websites. ELIXIR-compatible DL-models will be implemented in novel tools. Species identification will be standardized through links with (inter)national checklists, red lists, floras, and Catalogue of Life. Literature will be semantically enriched with new entity recognition modules.

Historical plant collections not only represent physical evidence of species’ occurrence at a particular time and place, they also shed light on the scientific interest of colonial powers and their search for economically promising plants during the last centuries. The treasure room of Naturalis houses a large bound book, containing some 200 dried plant specimens, collected by the German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolff in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Palestina from 1573 to 1574. On his long journey by horseback, camel and boat from Aleppo to Bagdad, Rauwolff described the natural vegetation along the Euphrates River, the vegetables and fruits grown in gardens and sold in city Bazars, and the spices and medicines transported by “Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Arabians, Persians and Indians, which come and go daily with their caravans”. Although Rauwolffs travel account of his trip to the "Levant and Mesopotamia" became a bestseller, the herbarium and the associated, handwritten information on local plant names and uses has never been thoroughly studied. To capture the scientific value of the Rauwolff herbarium, we will identify all its specimens and translate the accompanying German texts. How do the plant species in the Rauwolff herbarium match with his botanical drawings and travel account? Are local names and plant uses documented in 1574 by Rauwolff still known in the Near East today? We expect that medicinal plants preserved in the herbarium are not represented as botanical drawings or discussed in the travel account, as they were collected for secret, commercial purposes. We further hypothesize that the ethnobotanical knowledge for cultivated species still exists in the Near East, but for the wild species it is probably lost. We will test our hypothesis by studying recent literature on plant use in the Near East. Once the plants are properly identified, the texts translated, and the digital images published online, this project will disclose a nearly 500-year old scientific masterpiece to botanists, historians of science, agriculture and pharmacy, ethnobotanists and historians of the Near East. In a time when Syria’s cultural artefacts are rapidly being destroyed, we feel the moral duty to make this unique cultural and natural history object digitally available to the public: not only to the scientific world, but also to the citizens of Syria and their diaspora. Ethnobotanical fieldwork will not be possible for the coming years in this region. The plant names and uses in the Rauwolff collections represent a multicultural society that no longer exists in Syria or its surroundings. This project will reveal a hidden part of the natural and cultural history of the Near East. To study the plants, vernacular names and uses in this unique ethnobotanical treasure, we would like to invite Dr. Abdolbaset Ghorbani Dahaneh, an Iranian ethnobotanist from Turkmen descent. He has ample research experience in ethnobotany in the Near East, an impressive publication record, and is fluent in German, Arab, Turkish, English and Persian. Dr. Ghorbani works currently at Uppsala University in a research project on Iranian orchid conservation.