The Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has established the Priority Programme „Taxon-Omics: New Approaches for Discovering and Naming Biodiversity” (SPP 1991). The programme is designed to run for six years; the present call invites proposals for the first three-year funding period.

Taxonomy is the science most directly relevant for documenting and understanding changes in biodiversity, whether from species loss or from species introduction. Over the past ten years, this field has undergone a major shift because of its move towards DNA-based data, which can readily be shared. Research in this Priority Programme encompasses modern taxonomic approaches to discover, name, and quantify organismal diversity as the basis for documenting, assessing, and mitigating changes in biodiversity. Research will focus on one or more of the following areas:

• discovery and delimitation of species or other evolving units of interest, using modern approaches,
• accelerating the naming process and generating updatable identification tools, descriptions, classifications, or monographs, and
• efficient or novel use of natural history collections through automated image analysis, genetic or genomic data from historic specimens or living collections, or new ways of comparing and quantifying traits.

Interested researchers are invited to submit proposals for research projects, in English, no later than 14 September 2016 to the DFG. Proposals must be submitted via the DFG’s electronic submission system elan, selecting “SPP 1991”. In addition, we ask you to send a short summary of the proposed research (applicant(s), preliminary title, plus a maximum of five lines of text) no later than 15 July 2016 by e-mail to the speaker (Prof. Dr. Susanne Renner: renner(at)lrz.uni-muenchen.de).