An interdisciplinary team of scientists, led by junior professor Dr. Ann-Marie Waldvogel and Emmy Noether group leader Dr. Philipp Schiffer, has come together to lay the foundation for BioC² - the Biodiversity Genomics Center Cologne. The team links the Department of Biology and the Regional Computing Center (RRZK) of the University of Cologne (UoC) with the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding (MPI-PZ) and the West German Genome Center (WGGC), represented by the Cologne Center for Genomics (CCG). Funded by the Excellent Research Support Program of the University of Cologne, the project aims to interconnect infrastructures and pool competences to make genomic assessment of biodiversity feasible at the scale of entire ecosystems.