Meise Botanic Garden

Meise BG is one of the most important botanic gardens in the world with a history that dates back to 1796. The extensive plant collections form the basis for scientific research and public relations. A spearhead project for the Botanic Garden is the further digitization of the collections. Making our natural history collections accessible is an important first step for their further valorisation. 

The collection of living plants contains more than 30,000 accessions. These represent approximately 18,800 taxa, which corresponds to about 6% of the known species of vascular plants. Conservation efforts are optimized by studying genetic diversity of selected plant species, which can help us to decide on the sampling methodology and provides information on the diversity covered by the seed samples stored in our seed bank.

The herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden (BR) houses 4,000,000 collection items. According to the list of recognised herbaria, Index Herbariorum,  we are the 15th largest herbarium worldwide. Our largest collection consists of vascular plants (flowering plants and ferns) but the herbarium also houses mosses, fungi, algae (including diatoms), lichens, and slime moulds. The Belgian herbarium is particularly important as the Belgian flora is actively studied by a large number of scientists, amateurs and students. Early acquisitions include the collection of Baron Oscar de Dieudonné of Leuven, a keen amateur botanist and François Crépin, author of Flore de Belgique. 

In recent years, more than 2.5 million objects have been digitised, which means we now have images and associated data for a large part of the collection which are consultable through our virtual herbarium. Via digitisation of these collection pieces, a new era has begun and this treasure trove of information can be disseminated worldwide. A nice example of the importance of a digital herbarium is the rediscovery of giant needleleaf (Polycnemum majus) in Belgium due to a 152 year old herbarium specimen. 

To involve the public, Meise Botanic Garden launched in 2017 their DoeDat crowdsourcing platform that has been built using the Open Source project crowdsourcing platform DigiVol, built by the Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia. It was originally intended to facilitate transcription of herbarium labels of specimens collected in Belgium by volunteers but has since its launch extended its interface to host multiple languages (NL/FR/EN/D) and additional types of projects such as camera trap image annotations, archive transcriptions, label transcriptions of entomology collections etc. The platform has attracted interest from many external institutions. The platform has more than a thousand registered volunteers that together have completed more than 400,000 tasks.