In November 1979, the ESF Assembly approved the setting up of a new Additional Activity consisting of three research taxonomy projects, one in botany and two in zoology.
The project 1 "European Floristic,Taxonomic and Biosystematic Documentation System" started in November 1981; the project 2 reached at the begining of 1982, concerns the publication of a series of work on the European Marine Fauna. The project 3 the "European Plant-Parasitic Nematode Survey", started in July 1980, concerns the production of computer based maps of the distribution of individual nematode species.