Dear SESAR Community,

We’re thrilled to announce that SESAR “2.0” and our new website will be going live the week of September 21, 2026. This release represents the biggest update to SESAR since its founding in 2004. We’re bringing you modernized and redesigned user interfaces and an updated sample metadata schema, built to make registering, discovery, and updating sample metadata easier.

What’s changing:

• A refreshed interface and registration experience, including a more sophisticated, faceted search experience and streamlined individual and batch registration featuring dropdowns, suggested fields, integration of more persistent identifiers, and more.
• An updated sample metadata schema. SESAR “2.0” introduces revised and expanded controlled vocabularies serving a broader array of the Earth and environmental sciences and introducing preliminary support for materials sciences and archaeological applications.
• New and improved documentation, including an expanded FAQ section, step-by-step guides, updated API documentation, guidance for using IGSNs in datasets and publications, and more. 

We will be hosting a webinar to walk through what’s new in SESAR “2.0” in the near future. Please be on the lookout for additional notification from us. 

Planned downtime:

To complete the transition, SESAR will be unavailable for approximately three days (from September 21-23) as we migrate to the new system. During this window, sample registration, search, and related services will be offline.

Thank you for your patience as we roll out these improvements. If you have questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@geosamples.org.

The SESAR Team