Fauna Europaea (www.faunaeur.org)  is Europe's main zoological taxonomic index, making the scientific names and distributions of all living, currently known, multicellular, European land and freshwater animal species integrally available in one authoritative database. Fauna Europaea covers about 260,000 taxon names, including 145,000 accepted (sub)species, assembled by a large network of (>400) leading specialists, using advanced electronic tools for data collations with data quality assured through sophisticated validation routines.

Fauna Europaea has an important role in constituting the European taxonomic backbone, which is used in projects like the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON; www.eubon.eu). After establishing and running Fauna Europaea for nearly 15 years on the current technical infrastructure, the project is facing a transition into its second phase. The progress of migrating the data to the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy (www.cybertaxonomy.eu) by using the Common Data Model (CDM) has already started to achieve sustainability of future workflows.

In our presentation we want to outline the future strategy, the technological and community approach to further develop the taxonomic services for Europe and to stimulate the discussion regarding expectations, demands and perspectives.