Biology is the study of life in all of its diverse manifestations. It involves investigations of the functioning, origin and evolution of organisms, as well as their interactions with other organisms and with their environment. Consequently, biological research is essential to understand, protect and improve the well-being of all life on our planet. In fact, many biological discoveries are motivated by societal and environmental issues. Biological research continuously contributes to efforts to tackle the global challenges we face today, including climate change, the excessive exploitation of natural resources and biodiversity loss. Moreover, it helps us to design better and more sustainable means to improve the health and well-being of humans and animals alike. Possible solutions to complex global challenges require insights from multiple fields and interdisciplinary approaches. The boundaries between sub-fields are fading, as are the distinctions between fundamental, translational and applied research. Moreover, current research often combines sub-fields of biology, as well as physics, chemistry, geoscience and computer science. This development is manifested in many areas, including biomedicine, nutritional science, systems biology and ecology. While the transition from disciplinary towards interdisciplinary research is well under way in the Swiss biology community, it is often not fully represented on the institutional level. The trend towards interdisciplinary approaches is adequately met by multi-nodal networks. Moreover, network infrastructures match the decentralised organisation of the Swiss biology community, which consists of numerous specialised research groups representing a wide range of public and private entities, each of which provides high-level expertise in a specific area. Consequently, we recommend that research infrastructures for biology take the form of networks, whereas, in contrast to other disciplines like physics, large single-site core facilities are less suitable. The importance of network infrastructures is mirrored on the international and European levels: many of the European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC) are structured as networks connecting peers and institutions across numerous countries. The need for four dedicated network infrastructures is described in this roadmap: SwissBioCollection is focused on building the technical infrastructure needed for the digitisation, curation and coordination of natural history collections and biobanks for scientific discovery. SwissBioSites involves the establishment of a network of experimental sites to study and monitor natural and anthropogenic drivers of change in ecosystems. SwissBioData is focused on facilitating the production, standardisation, integration, analysis and sharing of large biological datasets, in particular regarding -omics data. SwissBioImaging is dedicated to the analysis of complex biological imaging data, which poses specific challenges in terms of unprecedented volumes of data, data richness and the lack of efficient, accessible tools for image analysis. Common to all four infrastructures described herein is the challenge of comprehensive data exploitation, which often constitutes a limiting bottleneck. This challenge extends far beyond mere data storage to all steps of data management. The configuration and setup of instrumentation should go hand-in-hand with the development of data analysis procedures that match both data acquisition schemes and data exploitation goals. Coordination between research groups is required to standardise workflows and streamline this development. Data management should achieve two major goals: interoperability of experimental datasets, as well as procedures that respect the specific requirements of the numerous sub-fields of biology. Therefore, in spite of the presence of somewhat related challenges in several fields of biology, four separate, dedicated network infrastructures are proposed to keep Switzerland at the forefront of international research in biology. The proposed infrastructures were identified in the course of an 18-month process starting in July 2019. Biologists from all fields and regions across Switzerland were invited to participate in and contribute to the elaboration of the present roadmap. They were contacted through the SCNAT’s Platform Biology of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, its specialised societies and the professional networks of all members of these societies.
