The portal of PESI (Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure) has been launched: www.eu-nomen.eu/portal and is available in 21 European languages. With time, it will be possible to find and search through the information of all species appearing in Europe. Not only the species living in seas and oceans, but also of all terrestrial and aquatic species. Currently, there are already nearly half a million scientific and non-scientific names in 88 languages for over 210 000 species and over 6 million distribution records.

The portal integrates major European checklists: Fauna Europaea (FaEu) for all European land and freshwater animals, Euro+Med Plantbase (E+M) with the vascular plants of Europe and the Mediterranean region, the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS) where species of the sea and coast are joined and the EU component of Index Fungorum (IF) for fungi. Still operating separately the register’s data however is merged yearly in the PESI Data Warehouse and is available through a single portal.

In addition to taxonomic information, PESI harvests information on species (images, literature, conservation status) and provides links to other portals (e.g. National check-lists, red species lists and other bioinformatics databases such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library for literature and the DNA databases of the Barcode of Life and GenBank). The PESI-website can be consulted in 21 European languages.

The PESI portal provides an intelligent name validation service and web services to cross-match external species lists against names in PESI (of the so-called TAXAMATCH tool). This enables the end user to standardize species names and promotes the use of the persistent identifiers generated by the different checklists.

More information about the project can be found on the website, in the flyer and in the information video-clip.