Milestone 9 gathers feedback from freshwater and marine use cases from Work Package 4 to the tasks embedded in Work Package 3. Challenges faced by scientists when using and creating taxonomic reference databases, when submitting high throughput sequencing data to public repositories or DNA-based occurrence data to biodiversity portals are documented and translated into a set of recommendations that should be considered by WP3 when creating the digital ecosystem for DNA-based aquatic datasets.
The digital ecosystem for DNA-based biodiversity analyses of the future needs to address these issues to greatly improve the transparency, accessibility, and usability of DNA-based datasets for biodiversity research and monitoring.