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Societies rely on a secure, responsible and affordable supply of resources to meet their basic needs, in order to live life in a safe and healthy environment. The natural resources from the subsurface, i.e. groundwater, geo-energy and raw materials, represent essential elements in this provision. Safety from catastrophic events, such as those linked to earthquakes, or continuous ones, such as subsidence, can be improved by understanding the causes, frequency or rates of processes, and their impacts. These applied goals require a correct and intimate understanding of the regional geology. While geological surveys and other organisations working on the subsurface were initially very much focussed on national supply of resources, issues such as environmental consequences have increasingly come to the forefront. Europe has now become the relevant scale when considering import or export of raw materials. This results in an increasing pressure to place regional knowledge in a cross-border or pan-European context. To support cross-border, thematic research, the European Commission issued a call for an ERA-NET to which a consortium of 33 national and 15 regional organisations responded. An ERA-NET is a project that internally organises a competitive call for projects. In 2017, GeoERA officially started. After an internal call for project proposals, 15 projects were approved that receive about 30% top-up funding under H2020. The remainder of the resources comes from different sources of funding, totalling the budget to 30.3 M€. Projects are funded under the themes Geo-Energy, Raw Materials, and Ground Water. A fourth theme, Data Infrastructure, will realise the shared ambition of all projects to jointly store and publish their data on-line as an extension of country specific databases (e.g. DOV, Gisel). The starting date of the GeoERA research projects granted funding is 1 July 2018, and the projects will run for three years. Belgian and Flemish institutes involved are: the Geological Survey of Belgium (GSB), the Bureau for Environment and Spatial Development – Flanders (VPO), the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Flanders Environment Agency (VMM) and the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN). Although not involved as official partner, the Geological Survey of Wallonia supports the initiative by means of data provision. The GSB is involved in seven projects, VITO, as linked third partyof VPO in two projects, VPO itself in one project, and VMM in three projects of which two will be elaborated in close cooperation with SCK-CEN, the linked third party of VMM. Together with VPO-VITO, the GSB is coordinator of GeoConnect³d, a strongly crossthematic Geo-Energy project that aims to disclose geological information for policy support and subsurface management. Other funded Geo-Energy projects in which the GSB is involved are MUSE, a project on shallow geothermal energy in European urban areas, and HIKE, on induced hazards and impacts related to the exploitation of subsurface resources throughout Europe. Under the theme Raw Materials the GSB participates in Mintell4EU, which aims to improve the European knowledge base on raw materials, as well as in FRAME, that is designed to research the critical and strategic raw materials in Europe. For groundwater the GSBeis directly involved in the HOVER project, mainly on data collection related to natural springs. VMM is also involved in HOVER, but in a work package on the distinction between anthropogenic and geogenic causes of groundwater contamination (especially how to deal with it in groundwater policy and management) with substances like arsenic. Moreover, VMM is, together with SCK-CEN, participating and leading a work package in two other Ground Water projects, namely VoGERA on investigating the vulnerability of shallow groundwater resources to deep subsurface energy-related activities, and RESOURces about harmonization of information about Europe’s groundwater resources through cross-border demonstration projects. Finally, the GIP-P project, where the GSB is work package leader, will establish a common platform for organising, disseminating and sustaining the digital results of the GeoERA projects. GeoERA is more than the occasional H2020 project. The combined efforts by the Belgian and Flemish institutes to engage in 10 different projects is a cooperative approach, with clear ambitions to demonstrate how cross-thematic research links can be set-up by different institutes, and how these can provide fruitful results for policy makers and other stakeholders. This is a notable effort in a project that is about establishing and demonstrating the added value of a European geological surveys research area, and finding how to optimally link regional, national and European efforts and interests. Acknowledgements This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731166

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The widespread view of taxonomy as an essentially retrogressive and outmoded science unable to cope with the current biodiversity crisis stimulated us to analyze the current status of cataloguing global algal diversity. Contrary to this largely pessimistic belief, species description rates of algae through time and trends in the number of active taxonomists, as revealed by the web resource AlgaeBase, show a much more positive picture. More species than ever before are being described by a large community of algal taxonomists. The lack of any decline in the rate at which new species and genera are described, however, is indicative of the large proportion of undiscovered diversity and bears heavily on any prediction of global algal species diversity and the time needed to catalogue it. The saturation of accumulation curves of higher taxa (family, order, and classes) on the other hand suggest that at these taxonomic levels most diversity has been discovered. This reasonably positive picture does not imply that algal taxonomy does not face serious challenges in the near future. The observed levels of cryptic diversity in algae, combined with the shift in methods used to characterize them, have resulted in a rampant uncertainty about the status of many older species. As a consequence, there is a tendency in phycology to move gradually away from traditional names to a more informal system whereby clade-, specimen- or strain-based identifiers are used to communicate biological information. Whether these informal names for species-level clades represent a temporary situation stimulated by the lag between species discovery and formal description, or an incipient alternative or parallel taxonomy, will be largely determined by how well we manage to integrate historical collections into modern taxonomic research. Additionally, there is a pressing need for a consensus about the organizational framework to manage the information about algal species names. An eventual strategy should preferably come out of an international working group that includes the various databases as well as the various phycological societies. In this strategy, phycologists should link up to major international initiatives that are currently being developed, such as the compulsory registration of taxonomic and nomenclatural acts and the introduction of Life Science Identifiers.

This paper reports on an orphaned collection of echinoderms housed at the Durban Natural Science Museum, South Africa. The collection includes holotypes of the South African endemic ophiuroid Asteroschema capensis Mortensen, 1925 [=Asteromorpha capensis (Mortensen, 1925)] according to Okanishi et al. (2013) and the South African endemic asteroid Anthenoides marleyi Mortensen, 1925. The holotype of the asteroid Hacelia superba var. capensis Mortensen, 1925 has not been found and is considered lost, whilst the holotype of Anthosticte pacei Mortensen, 1925 [=Tethyaster pacei (Mortensen, 1925)] is reported to be housed in the Zoological Museum Copenhagen, Denmark. The collection includes both wet and dry specimens of extant Asteroidea, Ophiuroidea, Echinoidea and Holothuroidea with Crinoidea being absent. Holothuroidea were excluded from examinations due to lack of locality data. In addition, Plococidaris verticillata (de Lamarck, 1816) is a new distribution record for South Africa. This paper gives new accession numbers of the specimens and the only photographic record of this collection.

Sex identification from fragmentary archeozoological assemblages is particularly challenging in the Equid family, including for horses, donkeys and their hybrids. This limitation has precluded in-depth investigations of sex-ratio variation in various temporal, geographic and social contexts. Recently, shallow DNA sequencing has offered an economical solution to equine sex determination, even in environments where DNA preservation conditions is not optimal. In this study, we applied state-of-the-art methods in ancient DNA-based equine sex determination to 897 osseous remains in order to assess whether equal proportions of males and females could be found in a range of archeological contexts in France. We found Magdalenian horse hunt not focused on isolated bachelors, and Upper Paleolithic habitats and natural traps equally balancing sex ratios. In contrast, Iron Age sacrificial rituals appeared to have been preferentially oriented to male horses and this practice extended into the Roman Period. During Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period, cities emerged as environments largely dominated by horse males. This strong sex-bias was considerably reduced, and sometimes even absent, in various rural contexts. Combined with previous archaeozoological work and textual evidence, our results portray an urban economy fueled by adult, often old, males, and rural environments where females and subadults of both sexes were maintained to sustain production demands.

Alongside horses, donkeys and their first-generation hybrids represent members of the Equidae family known for their social, economic and symbolic importance in protohistoric and historical France. However, their relative importance and their respective roles in different regions and time periods are difficult to assess based on textual, iconographic and archaeological evidence. This is both due to incomplete, partial and scattered historical sources and difficulties to accurately assign fragmentary archaeological remains at the proper taxonomic level. DNA- based methods, however, allow for a robust identification of the taxonomic status of ancient equine osseous material from minimal sequence data. Here, we leveraged shallow ancient DNA sequencing and the dedicated Zonkey computational pipeline to obtain the first baseline distribution for horses, mules and donkeys in France from the Iron Age to the Modern period. Our collection includes a total of 873 ancient specimens spanning 128 ubiquitous and the most dominant species identified, our dataset reveals the importance of mule breeding during Roman times, especially between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE (Common Era), where they represented between 20.0% and 34.2% of equine assemblages. In contrast, donkeys were almost absent from northern France as-semblages during the whole Roman period, but replaced mules in rural and urban commercial and economic centers from the early Middle Ages. Our work also identified donkeys of exceptional size during Late Antiquity, which calls for a deep reassessment of the true morphological space of past equine species. This study confirmed the general preference toward horses throughout all time periods investigated but revealed dynamic manage-ment strategies leveraging the whole breadth of equine resources in various social, geographic and temporal contexts.