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The FP7 project, PESI provides standardised and authoritative taxonomic information by integrating and securing Europe’s taxonomically authoritative species name registers. An online portal integrates several major European check-lists: Fauna Europaea (FaEu), Euro+Med Plantbase (E+M), European Register of Marine Species (ERMS, the EU component of the World Register of Marine Species), and the EU component of Index Fungorum (IF). These registers still operate on their own (different host institutions, committees, experts and servers). However, the data is merged on a regular (yearly) interval and is available through a single portal: www.eu-nomen.eu/portal. In addition to taxonomic information, PESI harvests additional information on species such as common names, images (through webservices, e.g. NLSR), distributions (through web services, e.g. AFE), literature, conservation status and provides links to other portals (e.g. national check-lists, red species lists) and other bioinformatics databases such as the GenBank sequence database, the Barcode of Life database (BOLD) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) for literature data.  Besides an attractive portal with a web page on every species, the portal provides an intelligent name validation service and web services to cross-match external species lists against names in PESI. This enables the end-users to standardize species names and promotes the use the persistent globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) generated by the different checklists. These GUIDs were also proposed as standard identifiers within the data specification schemes of the recently established INSPIRE directive. To support scientific research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, Europe launched LifeWatch within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. LifeWatch functions as a central virtual laboratory, integrating observatories, databases, web services and modeling tools distributed throughout Europe.  VLIZ contributes to LifeWatch by setting up a central taxonomic backbone (TB), managing a marine observatory, providing marine data systems, and offering data services, models and applications to the science community. The LifeWatch taxonomic backbone builds upon activities carried out under the PESI project, developing integrative access services on existing databases (PESI,WoRMS,CoL, etc.), completing and updating taxonomic and species related information with a central data management taskforce and supporting taxonomic societies.